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Launched by two Stanford professors who left academia to create a new networked vision of education. 

Back in August I wrote a post covering a rash of reports on the worrying rise of bad science in TED talks. A couple of months later TED pulled the following TEDx talk after the neuroscientist Bradley Voytek posted a question about it to Quora: "Is Randy Powell saying anything in his 2010 TEDxCharlotte talk or is it just total nonsense?". The top voted response was from Stanford theoretical physicist Jay Wacker and began:

Scaling College Composition by AUDREY WATTERS on 22 APR, 2012 I've been thinking a lot this week about two seemingly unrelated news items. The first, the research by David Shermis and Ben Hamner that found that automated essay grading software performs comparably to human graders. (See the Inside Higher Ed story.) The second, the official unveiling of Coursera, the latest online learning startup to spin out of Stanford, that promises to offer a full course catalog, including many classes in the humanities. (Here's my write-up of the news). The connection: scaling how we assess student writing.