Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge reports on massive online open courses and artificial intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng, who teaches one of the most popular ones.

• Nonprofits involved in higher ed should look at the influence and impact MOOCs can have — and why traditional institutions aren't necessarily the best practitioners.

• How far can online learning take local capacity building? Check this out.

One selling point of MOOCs (massive online open courses) has been that students can access courses from the world’s most famous universities. The assumption — especially in the marketing messages from major providers like Coursera and edX — is that the winners of traditional higher education will also end up the winners in the world of online courses.

But that isn’t always happening.

In fact, three of the 10 most popular courses on Coursera aren’t produced by a college or university at all, but by a company. That company — called Deeplearning.ai — is a unique provider of higher education. It is essentially built on the reputation of its founder, Andrew Ng, who teaches all five of the courses it offers so far.

Ng is seen as one of the leading figures in artificial intelligence, having founded and directed the Google Brain project and served as the chief scientist at the Chinese search giant Baidu, as well as having directed the artificial intelligence laboratory at Stanford University. He also happens to be the co-founder of Coursera itself, and it was his Stanford course on machine learning that helped launch the MOOC craze in the first place.

In fact, Ng’s original Stanford MOOC remains the most popular course offered by Coursera. Since the course began in 2012, it has drawn more than 1.7 million enrollments. (It now runs on demand, so people can sign up anytime.) And his new series of courses through Deeplearning.ai, which kicked off last year, have already exceeded 250,000 signups. Even allowing for the famously low completion rates of MOOCs, it still means that hundreds of thousands of people have sat through lecture videos by Ng.

In other words, Andrew Ng probably teaches more people than anyone else on the planet, putting him in a position to have an unprecedented impact on an emerging field.

Read the full article about Andrew Ng and Stanford MOOC by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge.