Daphne Koller Brings the World Into Stanford Classes

As Daphne Koller prepares to teach a course called Probabilistic Graphical Models this spring, the Stanford University computer science professor is in uncharted territory. More than 44,000 people across the globe have registered for the class, many times the total number of students she has taught in 17 years at Stanford.

Koller, a 43-year-old Israeli who graduated from college in Jerusalem at age 17 before attending Stanford for her Ph.D., is engaged in one of the most ambitious projects of her career. She and her colleague Andrew Ng last fall founded Coursera, a company that has created one of the world’s most advanced free online learning efforts.