Top U.S. colleges to offer free classes online

[cali]

Wed Apr 18, 2012 9:53am EDT

(Reuters) - Five prestigious U.S. universities will create free online courses for students worldwide through a new, interactive education platform dubbed Coursera, the founders announced Wednesday.

The two founders, both professors of computer science at Stanford University, also announced that they had received $16 million in financing from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Coursera will offer more than three dozen college courses in the coming year through its website at coursera.org, on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to neurology, from calculus to contemporary American poetry. The classes are designed and taught by professors at Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.

<snip>

Founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng say Coursera will be different because professors from top schools will teach under their university's name and will adapt their most popular courses for the web, embedding assignments and exams into video lectures, answering questions from students on online forums -- even, perhaps, hosting office hours via videoconference.

<snip>

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/18/net-us-usa-college-online-idUSBRE83H0PC20120418

[leveymg]

1. Thanks for posting this! Great courses!

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. the OpenAccess movement is growing!

My twitter feed is full of young scientists and students who are just running with #icanhazpdf and #openaccess education. The big push now is to refuse to peer-review for journals who charge you to read Taxpayer-funded research results. It goes hand in hand with Khan Acadamy and now this!

this is how it must have felt when the printing press was invented.

[ecstatic]

3. "Students will not get college credit."

Why not? Allowing the courses to actually count would be so helpful for people who are considering going back to school in a new field, but need to take certain pre-reqs first. It would be a less costly way for people to decide if that's the path they really want.

[notadmblnd]

4. Because they didn't pay? No pay, no credit.

[mike_c]

5. at the same time, many universities are looking to online courses for profit....

That is certainly the case at my university, the California State University. This will create two-tiered access to higher ed, one path for low income students and another for wealthier students.

The way it works is that "regular" classes get state support, i.e. students pay only a portion of the actual cost of instruction and the legislature pays the rest. That's what the "public" in public higher education means-- state support.

State supported classes can have online components-- most of mine do, for example-- or they can even be delivered completely online, at the same cost as in-class versions of the same courses.

A new wrinkle though is to create SELF-SUPPORTED auxiliaries that administer online courses, sometimes through extended education and other times through other entities. The CSU is working on rolling out CalState Online, for example. The key is that all classes in CSO will be self-supported, thus bypassing the cost subsidies that made the CSU "the people's university." Some lucky students will get access to classes, especially "bottleneck" classes in high demand, the old fashioned way, by enrolling in state supported regular classes. But those seats are limited, and with declining budgets their capacity goes down each year.

Wealthier students will be able to get those classes through extended education or CalState Online-- at full, unsubsidized cost.

My faculty union, the California Faculty Association, has been fighting this for several years now, without success. We think that if a CSU campus offers a class it should cost everyone the same. We think academic success and progress to graduation should depend upon ability and effort, not wealth.