Techno Sapiens: The Digital College Dropout Edition

Welcome to the third episode of Techno Sapiens, a biweekly series of six podcasts hosted by Future Tense fellows Christine Rosen, senior editor of New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, and Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment lawyer who has worked for Google, eBay, and Dropbox, among others.* Each podcast will examine how technology—now and in the future—will impact us as a species, and how we relate to each other.

On today’s episode, Christine and Marvin discuss online education with Daphne Koller, a computer science professor at Stanford University and the co-founder and president of Coursera, a digital learning platform, which has partnerships with universities around the world. The hosts ask whether massive open online courses (or MOOCs) will give us all greater access to a first-rate college education—or if they’ll be the death knell for higher learning as we know it.