This year, we are excited to see several TED alums on the list. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, was named a “Titan” in a piece written by Richard Branson. (Watch Branson’s TED Talk, “Life at 30,000 feet.”) Sheryl Sandberg, who recently released the book Lean In, also was dubbed a Titan. Daphne Koller, who co-created the website Coursera, was listed as a “Pioneer,” along with her venture partner Andrew Ng. And Michelle Obama made the list of “Icons.”

Below, watch their TED Talks.

We’d also love to give a shout-out to Perry Chen, who was a TED Fellow in 2010. The CEO of Kickstarter, he has intrinsically changed the landscape of funding, and was named a “Pioneer” by TIME.

Much ado has been made in recent years over the quickly rising cost of healthcare in the United States. But the cost of college tuition and fees has skyrocketed at nearly twice that rate. Going to college today will cost a student 559% more than it did in 1985, on average.

In an exciting talk given at TEDGlobal 2012, Stanford professor Daphne Koller explains why she was inspired — alongside fellow professor Andrew Ng — to create Coursera, which brings great classes from top universities online for free. Coursera classes have specific start dates, require students to take quizzes and turn in assignments, as well as allowing professors to customize their course into online chunks rather than simply recording their lectures.

When she spoke at TED Global, Coursera offered classes from four top colleges — Princeton University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania — but in July, Coursera announced that they had increased to 16 participating colleges, including five of the schools considered the top 10 in the country by the U.S. News & World Report. The site now offers 116 classes.

Even outside of Coursera, the number of college classes available on a computer screen rather than in a brick-and-mortar lecture hall is staggering. At TEDxEastside Prep, Scott Young gave the intriguing talk — “Can you get an MIT education for $2,000?” — in which he shared his effort to get an MIT education in computer science by taking the school’s Open Courseware free online courses. The result? He’s currently taken — as well as passed exams and completed programming assignments for –  20 of the 33 courses in schools’ curriculum.

Inspired by Young, below, find 12 courses you could take for a completely free TED degree in Big Ideas.

The Course: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
The School: Stanford, via YouTube
Taught By: Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun
Course Description: Artificial Intelligence is the science of making computer software that reasons about the world around it. Humanoid robots, Google Goggles, self-driving cars, even software that suggests music you might like to hear are all examples of AI. In this class, you will learn how to create this software from two of the leaders in the field.
Notes: When Thrun and Norvig first put this course online in the fall of 2011, 160,000 students from 209 countries enrolled. While the course is closed, you can still watch the lectures on YouTube. And see Norvig discuss what he learned teaching the course in the TEDTalk, “The 100,000 student classroom.”

The Course: The Structure of English Words
The School: Stanford, via iTunes
Taught By: Will Leben
Course Description: Thanks to historical, cultural, and linguistic factors, English has by far the world’s largest vocabulary—leading many of us to have greater than average difficulty with words, and some of us to have greater than average curiosity about words. Our historical and linguistic study will cover both erudite and everyday English, with special attention to word meaning and word use, to both rules and exceptions. Most words originated with an image. “Reveal” = “pull back the veil,” “depend” = “hang down from.” Change is constant. “Girl” once meant “a young child of either sex;” an early synonym for “stupid” was “nice.” Are there good changes and bad ones? And who gets to decide?

The Course: Physics for Future Presidents
The School: University of California Berkeley, via YouTube
Taught By: Richard A. Muller and Bob Jacobsen
Course Description: Contains the essential physics that students need in order to understand today’s core science and technology issues, and to become the next generation of world leaders. From the physics of energy to climate change, and from spy technology to quantum computers, this is a look at the modern physics affecting the decisions of political leaders and CEOs and, consequently, the lives of every citizen. How practical are alternative energy sources? Can satellites really read license plates from space? What is the quantum physics behind iPods and supermarket scanners? And how much should we fear a terrorist nuke?”
Note: A complete guide is available to anyone who wants to teach the class at their university.

The Course: Dilemmas in Bio-Medical Ethics: Playing God or Doing Good?
The School: MIT, via Open Courseware
Taught By: Erica James
Course Description: This course is an introduction to the cross-cultural study of bio-medical ethics. It examines moral foundations of the science and practice of western bio-medicine through case studies of abortion, contraception, cloning, organ transplantation, and other issues. It also evaluates challenges that new medical technologies pose to the practice and availability of medical services around the globe, and to cross-cultural ideas of kinship and personhood. It discusses critiques of the bio-medical tradition from anthropological, feminist, legal, religious, and cross-cultural theorists.

The Course: Videogame Theory and Analysis
The School: MIT, via Open Courseware
Taught By: Alice Robison
Course Description: This course will serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary academic study of videogames, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. By playing, analyzing, and reading and writing about videogames, we will examine debates surrounding how they function within socially situated contexts in order to better understand games’ influence on and reflections of society.

The Course: Sets, Counting and Probability
The School: Harvard, via the Open Learning Initiative
Taught By: Paul G. Bamberg
Course Description: This online math course develops the mathematics needed to formulate and analyze probability models for idealized situations drawn from everyday life. Topics include elementary set theory, techniques for systematic counting, axioms for probability, conditional probability, discrete random variables, infinite geometric series, and random walks. Applications to card games like bridge and poker, to gambling, to sports, to election results, and to inference in fields like history and genealogy, national security, and theology.

The Course: Introduction to Aerospace Engineering and Design
The School: MIT, via Open Courseware
Taught By: Dava Newman
Course Description: The fundamental concepts, and approaches of aerospace engineering, are highlighted through lectures on aeronautics, astronautics, and design. Active learning aerospace modules make use of information technology. Student teams are immersed in a hands-on, lighter-than-air (LTA) vehicle design project, where they design, build, and fly radio-controlled LTA vehicles. The connections between theory and practice are realized in the design exercises.

The Course: Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays
The School: Harvard
Taught By: Marjorie Garber
Course Description: This free online Shakespeare course focuses on Shakespeare’s later plays beginning with Measure for Measure and ending with The Tempest. This course takes note of key themes, issues, and interpretations of the plays, focusing on questions of genre, gender, politics, family relations, silence and speech, and cultural power from both above and below (royalty, nobility, and the court; clowns and fools).

The Course: Securing Digital Democracy
The School: University of Michigan, via Coursera
Taught By: J. Alex Halderman
Course Description: Computer technology has transformed how we participate in democracy. The way we cast our votes, the way our votes are counted, and the way we choose who will lead are increasingly controlled by invisible computer software. Most U.S. states have adopted electronic voting, and countries around the world are starting to collect votes over the Internet. However, computerized voting raises startling security risks that are only beginning to be understood outside the research lab, from voting machine viruses that can silently change votes to the possibility that hackers in foreign countries could steal an election. This course will provide the technical background and public policy foundation that 21st century citizens need to understand the electronic voting debate. You’ll come away from this course understanding why you can be confident your own vote will count — or why you should reasonably be skeptical.

The Course: Galaxies and Cosmology
The School: California Institute of Technology, via Coursera
Taught By: S. George Djorgovski
Course Description: This class is an introduction to the modern extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, i.e., the part of astrophysics that deals with the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. It will cover the subjects including: relativistic cosmological models and their parameters, extragalactic distance scale, cosmological tests, composition of the universe, dark matter, and dark energy; the hot big bang, cosmic nucleosynthesis, recombination, and cosmic microwave background; formation and evolution of structure in the universe; galaxy clusters, large-scale structure and its evolution; galaxies, their properties and fundamental correlations; formation and evolution of galaxies; star formation history of the universe; quasars and other active galactic nuclei, and their evolution; structure and evolution of the intergalactic medium; diffuse extragalactic backgrounds; the first stars, galaxies, and the reionization era.

The Course: Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World
The School: University of Michigan, via Coursera
Taught By: Eric Rabkin
Course Description: Fantasy is a key term both in psychology and in the art and artifice of humanity. The things we make, including our stories, reflect, serve, and often shape our needs and desires. We see this everywhere from fairy tale to kiddie lit to myth; from “Cinderella” to Alice in Wonderland to Superman; from building a fort as a child to building ideal, planned cities as whole societies. Fantasy in ways both entertaining and practical serves our persistent needs and desires and illuminates the human mind. Fantasy expresses itself in many ways, from the comfort we feel in the godlike powers of a fairy godmother to the seductive unease we feel confronting Dracula. This course will explore Fantasy in general and Science Fiction in specific both as art and as insights into ourselves and our world.

The Course: Bits: The Computer Science of Digital Information
The School: Harvard, via the Open Learning Initiative
Taught By: Harry R. Lewis
Course Description: This course focuses on information as quantity, resource, and property. We study the application of quantitative methods to understanding how information technologies inform issues of public policy, regulation, and law. How are music, images, and telephone conversations represented digitally, and how are they moved reliably from place to place through wires, glass fibers, and the air? Who owns information, who owns software, what forms of regulation and law restrict the communication and use of information, and does it matter? How can personal privacy be protected at the same time that society benefits from communicated or shared information?

Photo: ShutterStock

It would cost you a minimum of $37,000 to enroll for a year at one of the top 10 schools in the United States, according to the U.S. News & World Report. However, anyone with a computer will now be able to take courses from half of those schools … for free.

At TEDGlobal 2012, Stanford University professor Daphne Koller introduced us to Coursera.org, an effort to bring rigorous college courses online to anyone who wants them. At the time, Coursera offered classes from Princeton University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. However, today, Coursera announced partnerships with seven more top colleges in the United States: California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Georgia Tech, the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Rice University, the University of California San Francisco, the University of Washington, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

At the same time, Caltech and the University of Pennsylvania have extended a combined $3.7 million investment in the site. And three international schools — the University of Edinburgh, the University of Toronto and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne — have also signed agreements with Coursera.

When Koller spoke at TEDGlobal in late June, Coursera’s stats read as such: 680,000 students from 190 countries viewing 14 million videos and taking 6 million quizzes in 1.6 million course enrollments across 43 courses. However, with this new infusion, Coursera will now be offering about 111 classes.

Each class — and topics range from “Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach” to “Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World” — has a definitive start date, and includes comprehension testing.

In her TEDTalk, Koller explained that Coursera was created after her Stanford colleague Andrew Ng offered a machine learning class online for free and had about 100,000 people enroll. But the benefits of the site go beyond offering great classes to anyone interested. By collecting every click, homework submission, quiz and forum note from tens of thousands of students, Coursera is a data mine that offers a new way to study learning.

“We can transform the study of human learning from hypothesis-driven to data-driven mode,” Koller explained.

Schools out of reach

Daphne Koller is a third-generation PhD, and in her own words, she is certainly one of the lucky people. Most people, of course, are not.

In some parts of the world, quality education is simply not available. In South Africa, for example, the higher education system was designed during Apartheid, and there are far from enough positions available. Earlier this year, thousands of people lined up to get a position at university, resulting in a stampede. 20 were injured, and a woman died trying to get a place at university for her son.

Even in the US and similar countries, higher education is not always within reach. Tuition is going up at twice the rate of even the spiraling costs of health care. And yet only a little over half of recent grads are working in jobs where higher education is required.

The opening of education

Koller thinks now is the time when major change can come to education. Quoting Thomas Friedman, “Big breakthoughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.”

She has found what is suddenly possible. At Stanford, professor Andrew Ng offered a machine learning class for free online. He found that 100,000 people enrolled. To get the same number at Stanford, he would have had to teach the class for 250 years. Inspired by that, Ng and Koller founded Coursera, an site for free, online education. Currently, there are 43 courses from four universities with more to come.

In its short time, it’s been successful. ”Unsurprisingly,” Koller says, “students like getting the best content from the best universities for free.” To date they have had 640,000 students from 190 countries, who have view 14 million videos and 6 million quizzes. When she submitted her TEDTalk slides to our backstage techs a week ago there were 1.4 million enrollments, but she had to update a slide to 1.5 million as of the date of the talk.

Of course, the numbers only tell part of the story. Koller points to some remarkable stories, such as a father whose daughter is immune-deficient, and he couldn’t leave the house for fear of infecting her. The daughter has since gotten better, and the father has a job thanks to taking the courses.

What is different?

There have been many attempts at novel types of education. What is different about this one? According to Koller, the key is that “this was a real course experience. It started on a particular day, and the students did real homework for real grades with real deadlines.” At the end of the course, they receive a certificate.

As with many activities that have moved online, one of the main advantages is that the professors can move away from constraints imposed by traditional methods. Instead of a 50-minute “hour,” the material can be broken up into modular chunks. Students can traverse this in different ways. Different students might need background material, or some might want to supplement it because of their interests.

“Of course, we know that students don’t learn by just passively watching videos.” Koller has found ways to engage students using techniques that are proven to produce results. Simple retrieval practice is an enormous help — just asking them to retrieve something they learned increased the learning. So they built that into the video itself.

Additionally, the video doesn’t just run, it pauses and asks a question, so the student has to show they understand to be able to continue. These are the kinds of questions the instructor might ask in a classroom, but in a typical lecture only one student answers, and most don’t even realize a question has been asked.

Are the students learning?

This isn’t the final answer, you need deeper exercises. But that brings up one of the most difficult questions, how do you grade 100,000 students? Some types of material can be graded automatically, and Koller shows some beautiful examples that surpass simple multiple choice.

Of course, they can’t grade all types of work that way. For other disciplines, such as in the humanities or business they have had to build in a different paradigm. Surprisingly, “It turns out that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy.” Even better than that, shockingly, are self grades — if incentivized differently. Both of those also turn out to be good learning exercises.

The students have also become strongly involved in their own education. “This is not just about sitting alone in living room,” says Koller. A global community has developed. For example, they’ve developed forums for students to ask each other questions. And in some classes, the median answer time was 22 minutes, which is, Koller frankly admits, “not a level of service I’ve ever offered my students.” There are virtual study groups and physical study groups, some multilingual.

Learning from the learning

The potential for transforming education goes beyond the ability to teach lessons online — the data collected is unprecedented. They can collect every click, homework submission and forum from tens of thousands of students. “That can transform the study of human learning from hypothesis-driven to data-driven mode.” They can understand which methods are the best, and can understand specific misunderstanding. Koller shows an example where a large number of students — 2,000 — gave the exact same wrong answer to a quiz question. Why? They used that to improve the teaching method to address that specific misconception — and offer a targeted error message to students who submitted the answer, to steer them back on the right path.

Personalization is one of the biggest promises of this method. (The exact opposite of what many fear from massive online education.) Koller describes the 2-sigma problem — which is that an individual tutor is better than lecture based by what is called 2-sigma, which means that 98% of the individually tutored students were better than the mean of the lecture based class. That is an extraordinary difference. “Imagine if we could teach so that 98% of our students are above average. We can’t give each student an individual tutor, but maybe we can afford to give them a smart phone or a laptop.” And the computers, she notes, don’t get tired of grading the same work, or repeating lessons if the students need it.

An extraordinary future of education

Are universities obsolete? Mark Twain thought so, writing, “College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.”

Koller disagrees, and thinks a better quote is one from Plutarch: “The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.” The question, of course, is how do we light it up?

She wonder what would happen if we could offer the best education to everyone around the world. She thinks:

• It would establish education as a fundamental right.
• It would enable lifelong learning.
• It would open the door to wave of innovation, “…because amazing talent could be found anywhere.”

The audience agrees, rising to a massive standing ovation.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson