In the fall of 2011, Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course free and online to anyone in the world. The official course archive cited here records that the class ran “from October 10th to December 18th 2011” and that enrolled students “took the same homework assignments and exams as Stanford students” on campus, with a certificate of completion for those who passed. Press coverage at the time put enrollment above 160,000 students across more than 190 countries.
The experiment is widely treated as the spark for the massive open online course, or MOOC, movement. The archive itself now points visitors to Udacity, the company Thrun co-founded directly out of the experience, noting that “all of AI Class is now available through Udacity.” Two colleagues who ran parallel Stanford online courses that same term, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, went on to found Coursera the following year.
The course mattered because it demonstrated that a single instructor could reach a six-figure audience with interactive lectures, auto-graded assignments, and exams, all at near-zero marginal cost. That proof of scale reframed online education from a niche extension service into a venture-funded industry.
Why business readers should care: the 2011 AI class is the moment online learning crossed from broadcasting recorded lectures to delivering graded, certificate-bearing instruction at global scale. It set the template that AI tutors now extend by making the instruction itself adaptive and conversational.