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Zippy, engaging and colorful hand-drawn animations are
among the first things people notice about the way Robert
Ghrist teaches “Calculus: Single Variable” on Coursera.
Teaching Tens
of Thousands
Coursera Inspires Global Education
By Jessica Stein Diamond
Deadpan delivery and a running sight gag added a touch
of whimsy to the hefty intellectual content in Michael
Kearns’ largest class ever, “Networked Life,” with 44,000
students registered on Coursera.
Kearns, National Center Professor in the Department
of Computer and Information Science, appeared before
Independence Hall in the first lecture and Boathouse
Row in the second, and said: “Greetings and salutations
from the University of Pennsylvania. Broadcasting live
from beautiful downtown Philadelphia, I’m Michael
Kearns and this is Networked Life.” All 23 lectures in
the six-week course began with Kearns offering this
welcome, speaking as if on location before a series of
ridiculous studio backdrops: a giant iceberg, inside a
prison, and (the class favorite), a trash-strewn alley.
These quirky intros sparked an esprit de corps in the
largest class that Kearns, an innovator in the emerging
math and science of network structures, has ever
taught. Students of all ages and occupations hailed from
more than 50 countries.
“So much of my Networked Life class at Penn is about
online phenomena, their adoption and how to study
them, that it felt like I was morally obligated to be
one of the first movers on campus to create a Coursera
course,” says Kearns, founding director of Networked &
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