DAWN OF A NEW ERA: Less than a year ago we were spying on the blended learning trial in Oakland a la Khan Academy, while wondering how many people would build their own Udemy course. Six months and 23K "graduates" later, we ogled at Stanford's online class experiment, and Sebastian Thrun's startup, Udacity. Call us crazy, but it appears we are in the web 2.0 online course era. Or maybe it's just Coursera. The latest online course venture, from Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, aims to "flip" university lecture halls, leaving more time for "meaningful and engaging interaction between faculty and students," while freely sharing the prepared digital lessons with the world. Currently there are 16 courses slated for this winter and spring. Among them is a class on entrepreneurship by lean-startup demigod, Steve Blank. Oh yeah, they're funded and hiring.
