The website Coursera, which my readers have probably heard about, is a great example of modern social entrepreneurship. It’s not about micro-finance, it’s not about helping the poor nor is it about supporting African agriculture. It deals with providing top-quality university lectures to people all over the world, for free. It includes famous and renowned university participants such as Stanford University, Princeton University or even… UBC, which recently joined up.
Coursera’s mission is, as seen on their website and as can be interpreted as their mission statement, “to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.”
Quite an ambitious mission, but it seems to be working fairly well for now. 33 universities over the world have partnered with Coursera and offer very high quality contents to anyone who wishes to learn… for free. I personally took a gamification course by Kevin Werbach, a business expert specialized in internet & communication technologies and associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The course was very interesting, well documented, and very useful!