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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY FORTUNE; ORIGINAL PHOTO COURTESY OF JEFF MAGGIONCALDA
For some students, online learning brings back memories of pandemic isolation. But as schools have reopened over the past few years, students haven’t all returned to preferring in-person education. In fact, online learning has remainedpopular. For some students, it is the key to obtaining a flexible, affordable, and accessible education.
One of the biggest players in the online learning space is Coursera. It is more than just a place to learn, though—it’s a platform that is home to thousands of learning opportunities ranging from hour-long introductory courses all the way to master’s degrees from Ivy League institutions like the University of Pennsylvania.
Looking toward 2024, Coursera hopes only to grow in terms of number of learners as well as course offerings and partnerships, according to the company’s CEO, Jeff Maggioncalda. He says that Coursera’s mission to educate everybody in the world, through a platform-based business model, is the best solution out there to address the challenges that higher education and adult learning faces.
Using AI to increase accessibility
This time last year, fears about the power of AI—particularly ChatGPT and generative AI—had many in the edtech space on edge, with concerns about cheating on coursework as well as the replacement of workers and teachers top of mind. And while some worries do remain, using AI for good is now largely a focus, with many companies, including Coursera—using the tool to make learning more inclusive.
“COVID was a huge part of addressing the need for flexibility, affordability, and universal access. And then with generative AI, the first big thing that we did is we jumped on language translations. And now we have 4,200 courses translated into 17 languages,” Maggioncalda says.
Greek, Ukrainian, and Kazakh are among the new available language translations. AI, Maggioncalda says, has made the translations easier and more affordable.
But AI is also being deployed directly as a learning tool in the form of a personalized learning companion named Coach. Students can ask the chatbot to provide help on a concept, create practice problems, or summarize learning activities.
“Basically, what we’re doing is we’re building ChatGPT into every course as your personalized tutor,” Maggioncalda tells Fortune.
But Coach emphasizes learning, and thus won’t just give users the answer, especially during end-of-lesson quizzes, he adds.
Separately, from a partner standpoint, Coursera is utilizing AI to help build courses and develop content—something Maggioncalda is particularly excited about and has been using himself.
Coursera’s 300+ university and industry partners will be able to use the tool to generate outlines, write learning objectives, and compile lessons into new courses. Students with the Coursera Plus license will then be able to access the content for free (and the partners can make it for free). Maggioncalda compared the idea to Spotify—where content creators will get revenue based on user consumption.
Pathway degrees: The next big thing?
185 universities partner with Coursera and use the platform to host courses, degree, and certificate programs. 125 industry partners, the likes of Google, IBM, and Meta, use Coursera to host learning opportunities. Maggioncalda says these top players choose Coursera because of its quality as well as global distribution.
But above all, partners are choosing online learning due to the rising costs associated with education—especially in tech fields where developments are happening at lightning speed. As a result, many schools around the world haven’t been able to keep up and provide traditional opportunities in subjects like blockchain, cyber, generative AI, and MLOps.
“The biggest thing is things are changing so fast. And schools often have either a curriculum gap, or even within the courses being offered, there’s gaps in the course because things change. So what you find is that schools often cannot find faculty who know data science (for example) really well because they’re very expensive,” he says.
Beyond simply surviving as a platform for cheaper, more flexible educational journeys, Coursera is also providing unique opportunities with pathway degrees. Maggioncalda says they may be the most innovative thing Coursera has ever done.
Individuals can pick a subject area, say data science, business administration, or computer science, and begin their learning by taking a certification or specialized course—to not only jumpstart their career but to also help people figure out what they’re interested in.
Then, Coursera learners can apply that skills training directly to a degree program for credit.
Looking toward the future, all these endeavors are part of what Maggioncalda says will usher Coursera into an era of having the most adaptive, personalized, and effective learning experience that a student can have.
“We have real institutions with real, great quality content and great credentials, you can get a real professional certificate, you get a real college degree,” Maggioncalda says. “It’s all real.”
hen Judas and the Black Messiah screenwriter Will Berson was researching the final days of William O’Neal, the federal government informant who infiltrated the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, he came across something strange.
It was a small detail in a Chicago Tribune article published in 1990, shortly after O’Neal died in a fatal accident that was ruled a suicide. O’Neal is the film’s titular Judas (played by LaKeith Stanfield) to Fred Hampton’s Black Messiah (played by Daniel Kaluuya); Berson was trying to learn as much as possible about the informant, who supplied key information for the controversial 1969 predawn raid that killed Hampton and fellow Black Panther member Mark Clark.
“It’a very long article—probably 1,500 words or something,” recalled Berson, who wrote the screenplay with the film’s director, Shaka King, based on a story by brothers Kenneth and Keith Lucas. “It talks about his life and working for the FBI, and it says he killed himself by walking out on the Eisenhower freeway into oncoming traffic. And then it goes on and there’s a tiny, almost throwaway paragraph, revealing that another man from the same housing complex killed himself in the same way in almost the same spot hours later. ” The exact excerpt:
On Monday evening, a second man who lived in the same apartment complex where O’Neal had been visiting before his death, apparently committed suicide by running onto the Eisenhower and was struck by a truck in virtually the same place as O’Neal, Kirschner said. Relatives said the two men did not know each other.
Berson’s admittedly “crazy” theory: that O’Neal “didn’t kill himself, and was put back in hiding by the FBI.” Berson said he shared the theory with the film’s creative team and was very much “derided for it.” Berson explained that his rationale, in part, is that O’Neal had a five-month-old baby at the time of his death.
“I think there was certainly the possibility that he looked at his own son and knew what he had deprived Fred Hampton of,” said Berson; Hampton himself died before his child was born. That said, he continued, “I think it’s certainly logistically more likely that he killed himself. But I also think, given everything we know about the FBI, given everything we know about O’Neal...I really wouldn’t be surprised if some other dude did actually kill himself that night—walked onto the freeway and Fred said, ‘Okay, we’re just going to put in the newspaper that happened twice and no one will know.’”
In a separate interview, King said that he doesn’t think the theory is completely out of line. “I think it’s not impossible,” King conceded. “I don’t think it’s true, though. Because I don’t understand what the purpose would be for him to go back into witness protection.”
O’Neal died months after filming an episode of the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize II, in which he reflected on his experience infiltrating the Black Panthers and working with Hampton. A haunting excerpt of the interview appears at the end of Judas and the Black Messiah. King said that before filming, he managed to track down someone who had worked on Eyes on the Prize II and discovered the strange circumstances in which O’Neal—who was going by the alias William Hart at the time of the taping—came to participate.
“He was tracked down by the producers and he said, ‘I’m in one of these three places—Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. If you pick the right place, I’ll do the interview,’” recalled King. “They picked the right one and they met him there. He wouldn’t take off his sunglasses for the first 45 minutes.”
King said that he felt that O’Neal was very much conflicted in the interview—especially, King pointed out, because O’Neal used “we” interchangeably to refer to himself with both the FBI and the Black Panthers. The interview was really the only piece of archival footage the filmmakers had of O’Neal.
“We had to kind of scrub that stuff like a detective to get a sense of what this person was thinking, how they—how they felt about what they did. Because so much of that interview is filled with lies,” said King. “He was lying to himself after all these years […] we had to really parse through that and go through that stuff for clues.”
Shortly after O’Neal’s death, an official told the Chicago Tribune that the informant “was always a mysterious guy. He could play all the roles, every part [the FBI] needed. I think he never got it out of his system and was confused.”
O’Neal’s uncle Ben Heard told reporters that O’Neal had run onto the highway once before, but survived without an injury.
Fred Hampton’s late brother Bill, meanwhile, theorized at the time that O’Neal’s guilt over being an informant had caught up to him: “It’s something he tried to live with and couldn’t.”
In “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Daniel Kaluuya gives an electrifying performance that raises the hairs on the back of your neck. As Fred Hampton, the murdered chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, Kaluuya is riveting as he prowls the stage inspiring his audiences. His speeches burn with intensity and conviction. When FBI informant William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), the Judas in the title, tells his handler Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) that Hampton “could sell salt to a slug,” it’s not hyperbole; Kaluuya makes you believe he’ll succeed in his mission to unite a “rainbow coalition” of people of all races against a common enemy. It’s stellar work that will be talked about for some time, and it buys a lot of goodwill for a film that has some serious script problems.
Fred Hampton’s preternatural ability to bring potential enemies and rivals together made him dangerous to an America all too happy with the racist status quo. So he became yet another entry in the “Black Messiah” christening sweepstakes the FBI kept awarding after their prior candidates for the title were assassinated. Hampton would be assassinated as well, on December 4, 1969, exactly 20 months after the last “Black Messiah,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. O’Neal played a large role in facilitating this tragedy, providing Hampton’s apartment layout and even doing a bit of the FBI’s dirty work a few hours before. Since he was a trusted confidant whose ultimate goal was betrayal, the Biblical allusion in the title is an appropriate one.
Though he’s not as fleshed out as Jesus is in the Good Book, Judas remains perhaps the most important supporting character in the Gospels. Here, however, Judas is technically the lead, which wouldn’t be a problem if the script by director Shaka King and Will Berson had made him as compelling as Hampton. Instead, much of the role languishes in one-note scenes between him and the FBI agent who’s holding jail time over his head. In the recreation that opens the film, O’Neal appears in the PBS documentary, “Eyes On the Prize 2,” saying he trusted Mitchell and even saw him as a figure to emulate. Little of that comes through in the scenes between Plemons and Stanfield, though there are moments where it appears the film may deepen this fraught relationship. A scene where Mitchell invites O’Neal to his home and offers him the good Scotch is rife with potential for examining how an act of implied White civility could engender trust; instead the scene ends with some clunky dialogue about money.
We also spend too much time within the FBI. Despite the excellent cinematography by Sean Bobbitt and the editing by Kristan Sprague, these sequences are not as interesting as anything featuring the Black Panthers and their goals. As “MLK/FBI” showed, J. Edgar Hoover took an active role in trying to squash any type of Black attempt to force the country to provide equality and reckon with its racial and economic sins. Here, Hoover is played by Martin Sheen under so much makeup he looks like a melted candle, and he gets the film’s worst scene, stopping the momentum cold with dialogue that references the Korean War, protecting one’s family and the possibilities of Mitchell’s eight-month-old daughter dating a Black man. Plemons looks as flabbergasted as the audience feels.
Had “Judas and the Black Messiah” focused primarily on O’Neal earning Hampton’s trust, it would have worked better for me. I’ve seen those FBI plotlines done better in a million other movies, but this film really soars when we’re with the Black Panthers. And it’s not just Kaluuya’s excellent work, it’s also Dominique Fishback as his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson. Their flirty back-and-forth results in a believable romance, made all the more bittersweet by our knowledge of how it will end. Fishback is so good, especially in her heartbreaking final scene, that you wish she had more screen time.
King also excels at depicting harrowing scenes of violence. A subplot involving a character described as “a square” ultimately breaking down and resorting to a vengeful shoot-out with the cops is notable both for how unflinching it is and for a scene where the man’s mother laments that this will be his legacy. These and other brutal scenes foreshadow the Panthers’ final confrontation with a law enforcement department that was clearly breaking the law.
Stanfield gives his all in an underwritten part that keeps his role at arm’s length. It’s an uphill battle that I found commendable even if it lacked a deeper dive into his motivations. How does he feel about being an informant? Is he just in it for the money? More than once, he does something that muddies the waters of intent, but we never get a bead on how affected he may be, nor is the connection between O’Neal and Hampton deep enough for us to feel the full emotional weight of the FBI’s figurative thirty pieces of silver. Yet this is a film that requires more contemplation than a Sundance Film Festival review’s deadline will allow. I want to sit with it some more, see it again, and consider a few things. I feel like I owe it that. For now, however, it’s a marginal recommendation with some reservations.
These historically Black colleges and universities were compared only with one another for these rankings. To be on the list, a school must be currently designated by the U.S. Department of Education as an HBCU. To qualify for the U.S. News rankings, an HBCU also must be an undergraduate baccalaureate-granting institution that enrolls primarily first-year, first-time students and must be a school that is part of the 2021 Best Colleges rankings. Read the methodology »
EXACTLY 150 YEARS AGO, on June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island with 2,000 federal troops and issued General Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The proclamation Granger referred to was, of course, the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln had signed two and a half years earlier but which had been impossible to enforce until the end of the Civil War.
At the time of the order, there were approximately 250,000 slaves in Texas. Over the following years many of them left rural plantations for rapidly growing urban areas like Houston, Austin and San Antonio, where they continued holding annual celebrations every year on June 19—Juneteenth, as it became known.
In 1872, a group of African American ministers in Houston helped raise money from the community to purchase a 10-acre plot of land in the Third Ward, which they named Emancipation Park.
It has served as the cultural center of the city’s African American community, and the site of Juneteenth celebrations, ever since.
