Two Stanford professors, including Graduate School of Education Professor Carl Wieman, have been chosen to be members of a new consortium charged with developing standards and best practices for online education.

Wieman, a professor of physics and education, and Koller, a computer science professor, join 11 other education and technology research leaders in the Global Learning Council. The council is part of an initiative announced this week by Carnegie Mellon University.

"The world is experiencing an educational revolution, but there has not been sufficient effort to date to address the fundamental question: Are students using these technology platforms really learning successfully?" asked Carnegie Mellon President Subra Suresh in a news release. "Our goal is to create guidelines and best practices that ensure academic rigor and successful learning for students worldwide."

The council is part of the new Simon Initiative, which will focus on where technology impacts education. The goals of the project include sharing rich data, helping teachers teach, accelerating innovation and scaling through start-up companies, and improving the campus-based learning experience.

The council will use data compiled at Carnegie Mellon and other institutions to research how people learn and best practices.

Wieman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2001,  is a leader in the effort to rethink university science instruction. He is the first faculty member at Stanford to be jointly appointed in the Department of Physics and Graduate School of Education.

Koller is a co-founder of Coursera, an education technology company offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. She joined Stanford's Computer Science department in 1995.

The other members are Suresh; Anant Agarwal, President, edX; Tan Chorh Chuan, president, National University of Singapore and chair, Global University Leaders Forum of the World Economic Forum; Anoop Gupta, distinguished scientist, Microsoft Research; Alan Leshner, chief executive officer, American Association for the Advancement of Science and member, National Science Board; Peter McPherson, president, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities; Mark Nordenberg, chancellor, University of Pittsburgh; Hunter Rawlings, president, Association of American Universities; Andrew Rosen, chairman and CEO, Kaplan; Alfred Spector, vice president of research, Google; and Suzanne Walsh, deputy director, Postsecondary Success, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and member, World Economic Forum, Global Agenda Council on the Future of Universities.