1415T1g1 Silicon Vallley/Participant Information/Teams/Team8

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Companies We're Contacting

Coursera

Contact Us

If you have any "lobang" or information that would help us in contacting and negotiating with the companies, please contact us:

Name	Mobile	Email
Benedict	96246956	benedict.ho.2012@sis.smu.edu.sg
Jiadong	91304629	jd.zeng.2012@sis.smu.edu.sg
Coursera-Jun Jie	-	junjieliang@gmail.com

How Coursera started

Coursera is an education information technology company founded by two Stanford University Professors; Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera is started to offer Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)

About Coursera

A free online education platform for anyone andd everyone to take. It has wide range of partnerships with top universities (Including National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University) and organisation. Coursera believes in a future of accessible world-standard education to anyone. Their aim is to be a channel of provision of education to the community to improve their lives with the aid of better education, helping society as a whole

What Coursera offers?

Coursera provides many online courses and it has a very user-friendly web application for user to find and learn the courses online. With their easy-to-use application, user can simply click on the 'learn now!' button, and began their journey of enrichment. These courses can be learn on their own pace, and learning can take place any time and day. Comfort is priority to learning!

In addition to just simply displaying range of courses available to the public, Coursera specially provides a specialization path for those keen enthusiastic learner. It is a guided path that is supervised by the university and it will lead the user with the different stages for the course. But of course! It comes with a price.

Top 10 most popular courses in Coursera.

1. Computer Science 101 (Stanford University)
2. Machine Learning (Stanford University)
3. An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (Rice University)
4. Cryptography I (Stanford University)
5. Model Thinking (University of Michigan)
6. Gamification (University of Pennsylvania)
7. Startup Engineering (Stanford University)
8. A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior (Duke University)
9. Functional Programming Principles in Scala (École Polytechnique de Lausanne)
10. Statistics One (Princeton University)

What does Coursera course include?

• An introduction/syllabus and a basic outline of materials the course will discuss.
• A set of lectures, ranging anywhere from 3-6 videos, that are each 20-30 minutes each which introduce concepts and basic problems. Students are encouraged to discuss difficulties in the Forum.
• A problem set/assignment/quiz that you are required to submit that reinforces the material introduced in the videos.
• Your assignment grade will be given to you the following week, and a new set of lectures are released.
• At the end of the course (usually 8-10 weeks), a Final exam is given. These exams are flexible (you can take the exam in a certain range of days), and count towards the final grade alongside quizzes, tests, and problem sets.

In January 2013, Coursera announced that the American Council on Education had approved five courses for college credit.

Credibility of Coursera Certificate

The Coursera certificates do not carry the same official recognition as a university courses do (even for the Signature track). But the knowledge and the skill sets obtained through those courses are invaluable.

If you want to vouch for those skills and knowledge while applying for masters or a job, then it is essential to state what exactly you have learned in those courses and maybe even some further work you may have done based on the course content.

So the answer is that right now, employers are utterly confused and unclear about the value of a Coursera Certificate. That will likely change within 3-5 years, or even sooner if Coursera has a really good PR team. At the moment though, don’t expect your Coursera Certificate to get you an interview at Google!

Our Approach

How did we contact the company We had the privilege of Prof Benjamin Gan to help us with the liaison with Coursera's member called Jun Jie. Jun Jie is a very friendly and welcoming staff stationed at Coursera, he is very hospitable in his mails and provided us with comprehensive details for our visit to Coursera

Progress Updates

Date	Action
26th August 2014	Some action.