Dear friends,
Last week I spoke at Coursera Connect, the company’s annual conference in Las Vegas, where a major topic was AI and education. There has been a lot of hype about generative AI’s ability to transform industries overnight. Certainly many industries — including education — will be transformed. But we’re about 15 years into the deep learning revolution, and we’re not yet done identifying and building useful deep learning applications. Despite the exciting progress to date with generative AI, I expect that a decade from now we will still be far from finished identifying and building generative AI applications for education and numerous other sectors.
This was the first time since 2019 that Coursera’s conference was held in person. It was great to see so many people dedicated to the educational mission coming together to discuss innovations, including generative AI innovations, that serve learners.
Coursera’s CEO Jeff Maggioncalda and the company’s executive team demonstrated multiple generative AI products, such as:
- Coursera Coach, a chatbot that understands the context of a learner's journey and answers their questions (without giving away exact answers to quiz questions!)
- Course Builder, which businesses are using to customize long courses or specializations quickly, for example, by selecting the parts most relevant to their business
- Coach for Interactive Instruction, which lets learners have a Socratic dialog and learn or practice new concepts in conversation
Because AI is a general-purpose technology, there are many opportunities to apply it to different tasks in education. I was thrilled at the volume of experimentation happening across Coursera, DeepLearning.AI, and the broader ecosystem of partners and customers. I was also proud to present awards to many partners and customers who are doing great work to serve learners.
I was particularly gratified by the number of people coming together in service of the education mission. Even before the recent rise of AI, education was already urgently in need of improvement. With AI transforming jobs, the need has become even more acute. My heart was warmed by the conversations I had with many people from universities, high schools, businesses, and the Coursera team who have a deep desire to help others through education.
Coursera held its first conference in 2013, when the online education movement was in its early days, and we all had high hopes for where it could go. Today, there are over 155 million learners on Coursera. Despite that, given society’s heightened need for education and AI’s potential to transform the field, I feel the opportunities for edtech at this moment are greater than at any moment over the past decade.
Keep learning!
Andrew
P.S. I’m excited to announce our new specialization, Generative AI for Software Development, taught by Laurence Moroney! Using chatbots to generate code is not the only way AI can help developers. This three-course series shows you how to use AI throughout the software development lifecycle – from design and architecture to coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Everyone who writes software can benefit from these skills. Please sign up here!