Coursera partners with 12 major research universities to offer more than 100 FREE online courses
From the Globe and Mail at this link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/online-university-for-the-masses/article4426073/
How would you like to take the best courses from the best professors at the best universities in the world – basically for free? How would you like to interact online with fellow students, have your online questions answered within minutes and take quizzes for real marks?
You can now. And the revolution is just beginning. This week, the University of Toronto joined Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and a dozen other major universities offering free online courses to anyone anywhere in the world with a computer. They are partners in Coursera, an online venture launched a year ago by two Stanford University computer scientists. No pesky entrance exams or prerequisites required. No $40,000 tuition, either. For more information, visit Coursera at this link: https://www.coursera.org/
Coursera is just one of many new initiatives in online learning. Harvard and MIT are pouring millions into edX, a joint venture that will offer their own online courses. This spring, MIT launched an experimental online version of a course called Circuits and Electronics. Almost 155,000 people signed up. More than 7,000 passed.
Online education has been around in various forms for a while, but the response to these courses has been massive. Last fall, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun launched an online version of his graduate-level course on artificial intelligence. He thought 500 people might sign up. He drew 137,000, two-thirds of them from outside the United States. The course (which requires a grasp of Bayesian probability) is so hard that only a few thousand people stuck it out and passed. But Prof. Thrun was so struck by the demand that he quit his job and launched his own online company, Udacity. He predicts that in 50 years, only 10 institutions in the world will be offering higher education.
Read the full article at this link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/online-university-for-the-masses/article4426073/