This method did not seem satisfactory to Professor Koller and others at Stanford. She and her students organized a program that tested possible changes. The changes they accepted became part of Coursera. One such reform was the auto graded assessment, in which students test themselves on their progress.

Andrew Ng was working separately from Professor Koller at the time. He was developing technology for improving educational methods while she worked on course content or information. Her main goal was to increase the time that students spent with their professor.

The two teachers came to understand that they had the makings of something new. In fall of two thousand eleven, Stanford offered courses open to students who do not attend the university.

Mr. Ng remembers launching the courses, and finding that he and Daphne Koller had created something very popular.

“We’d been working on technology for several years, and this had culminated last year with Stanford University offering three free online courses, each of which had an enrollment of something like one hundred thousand students and up. And based on that, we

Today, that “something” has more than one million students. Will many of these students do all of their college work by computer? If so, they would enter the professional world with course completion documents instead of a degree. For years, a degree has been the sign to employers that students have completed the requirements for a college education.