In March, Daphne Koller’s two teenage daughters were in a Zoom session at their private high school. “We caught one of them in the middle of class playing Sims, and the other one watching a Netflix video,” she says. That led to a dinner table discussion with her tech entrepreneur husband Dan Avida. “We started talking about how great the need was for something other than Zoom,” says Koller, 52, a computer scientist, MacArthur genius and cofounder of online learning platform Coursera, recently valued at $2.5 billion.
Today Avida, Koller and two cofounders are launching Engageli, a Silicon Valley-based startup that sells a learning platform for real-time online higher ed courses. They say it does a much better job than Zoom of engaging students, hence the name. Koller, who taught computer science at Stanford for 18 years, also believes Engageli can offer a superior learning experience compared to traditional lecture classes. “If you’re in a 500-person auditorium in row 23 looking down at the instructor writing stuff on the board—the Engageli experience is much better than that,” she says.
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