Can online education grow up?


First Stanford, then Google, then multimillion-dollar startup.

Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng has put together an impressive resumé in Silicon Valley, Upstart reports.

Now the 37-year-old Stanford computer science professor is parlaying his academic and corporate experience into a startup that aims to put an elite education within reach for anyone with a Web connection.

The question is whether Coursera, which has amassed $85 million in funding, can deliver on that promise while actually making money in the sizzling education technology field.

Ng works as co-CEO of Coursera, which closed a $63 million Series B round of venture and university funding in November. The company, a purveyor of the online classes known as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, currently claims about 5.5 million users.

So far, however, Coursera and many of its competitors haven’t established meaningful revenue streams. So they’re turning their sights on the $62 billion U.S. corporate training market, where they’ll collide head-on with competitors who have deep pockets.

… The corporate education market is also getting attention from parties outside the Silicon Valley startup world. Elite universities and for-profit education groups like University of Phoenix parent the Apollo Group are currently honing their own enterprise offerings.

Why the rush to land those clients?

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