April 18, 2012 1:00 pm

By JOHN MARKOFF/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO -- An interactive online learning system created by two Stanford computer scientists plans to announce Wednesday that it has secured $16 million in venture capital and partnerships with five major universities.

The scientists, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, taught free Web-based courses through Stanford last year that reached more than 100,000 students. Now they have formed a company, Coursera, as a Web portal to distribute a broad array of interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences and engineering.

Besides Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, where the venture has already been offering courses, the university partners include the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.

Although computer-assisted learning was pioneered at Stanford during the 1960s, and for-profit online schools like the University of Phoenix have been around for several decades, a new wave of interest in online education is taking shape.

"When we offer a professor the opportunity to reach 100,000 students, they find it remarkably appealing," Dr. Koller said.

Last fall a course in artificial intelligence taught by Sebastian Thrun, then at Stanford, and Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, attracted more than 160,000 students from 190 countries.

The free course touched off an intense debate behind the scenes at Stanford, where annual tuition is $40,050. Ultimately, the 22,000 students who finished the course received "certificates of completion" rather than Stanford credit. And Dr. Thrun, who also directs Google's X research lab, left his tenured position at Stanford and founded a private online school, Udacity.

Coursera (pronounced COR-sayr-uh), based in Mountain View, Calif., intends to announce that it has received financial backing from two of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates. The founders said they were not ready to announce a strategy for profitability, but noted that the investment gave them time to develop new ways to generate revenue.

See more here:
Online Education Venture Lures Cash Infusion and Deals With 5 Top Universities