Koller, co-founder of the popular massive open online courses platform Coursera, likened the anecdote to online education platforms' importance in transforming higher education. Coursera, founded last year, has already enrolled 3.1 million students from 196 countries.
On Monday, Koller shared Coursera's story with a large audience, consisting mostly of faculty, administrators and community members as part of the College's "Leading Voices in Higher Education" series.
Coursera provides free classes through large-scale web interfaces and currently offers 329 courses from 62 universities, ranging from math and computer science to history and philosophy.
Since 1985, the cost of a college education has increased by 559 percent, two times greater than the increase in the cost of medical care, Koller said.
As higher education becomes more unaffordable, online education platforms can extend education to students in underprivileged and developing regions of the world.
"There are students enrolled from many countries in sub-Saharan Africa," Koller said. "A basic course in computer science can, in one course, open up the opportunity for a white collar job that they might not otherwise have."
Despite the large numbers of students enrolled in each course, Coursera has developed methods to optimize online learning and improve the student user experience, Koller said. For example, lectures are broken up into "bite-sized chunks" that allow students to learn at their own pace. Many courses use "peer grading," a method by which students who have already completed assignments grade their classmates' work.
"This is an incredibly valuable learning experience for the students because if you think about the process, the students doing the grading have just finished submitting that very same piece of work themselves," Koller said. "And then all of a sudden they're seeing five different solutions to that same problem. And if you think about it, that's really a first step towards creativity, realizing that the same problem can be solved in different ways."
Some MOOC professors who use peer grading to streamline online grading have begun to use peer grading in their own on-campus classes, Koller said.
Most Coursera students have already received degrees in higher education, and many of these students are taking courses simply to expand their knowledge base or to learn a skill for a new job.
"College is the first six, eight or 10 years of your adult life, then there's the next 50," Koller said. "And the world around us is now changing far too quickly for the stuff that we learned in college 20 years ago to still be enough to sustain us for the rest of our lives."
Instead of focusing on online education platforms as a way of earning college credit, educators could approach MOOCs as a means of promoting life-long learning, said Denise Anthony, chair of the faculty strategic planning advisory committee.
Online education platforms can function similarly to libraries, as they facilitate access to content without replacing higher education institutions.
"People want to be engaged in learning experiences, even if it's not in a 10-week term," Anthony said. "So lots of people sign up for MOOCs, hundreds of thousands. And then some of them complete a few of the assignments or participate in some of the lectures and not all. And that's a really interesting implication that she didn't really talk about."
Coursera's most popular course is a Duke University philosophy course, which enrolled 180,000 students.
Chief Information Officer and vice president for information technology Ellen Waite-Franzen, who attended the lecture, said Koller's presentation displayed data and information to highlight Coursera's effectiveness in expanding education to underprivileged groups.
Online education platforms such as Coursera could supplement lectures and in-class materials, Cecilia Robinson '16 said.
"I already use Khan Academy to supplement my physics classes, so I think that Coursera will also be useful to supplement the information that my professors present during lectures," Robinson said.
Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization that provides free educational videos.
Koller's lecture is closely tied to the College's strategic planning process, said acting associate provost for international affairs Lindsay Whaley, who introduced Koller before her lecture. Faculty and administrators are considering ways to integrate technology and blended learning techniques with traditional education methods, she said.
"One of the things that's excited a lot of people about MOOCs at Dartmouth is not so much showcasing ourselves for education of the world, as it is what can we learn to become better at what we do here in the classroom," Whaley said.
President-elect Philip Hanlon sits on Coursera's board.
