Recent Coursera Additions

This video is from the Coursera Youtube Channel.

The video above previews a free online course that Fatimah Wirth, an instructional designer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, will offer with Coursera, a company that partners with universities across the world to offer a free courses online. Wirth's course, Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application, will cover the fundamentals of facilitating learning through online courses and prepare instructors to convert one's classroom-based curriculum into meaningful web-based courses. 


Wirth is one of many professionals who have committed to delivering online Coursera courses. Earlier this week, Coursera announced that 12 additional universities, including three international institutions, will offer courses through its course management system. Below is a list of all of the universities that now partner with Coursera (the red ones are international institutions):

1. University of Pennsylvania
2. University of California, Berkeley
3. University of Michigan
4. Princeton University
5. Stanford University
6. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
7. University of Toronto
8. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
9. Johns Hopkins University
10. Duke University
11. Rice University
12. California Institute of Technology
13. University of Edinburgh
14. University of California, San Francisco
15. University of Virginia
16. Georgia Institute of Technology
17. University of Washington

Also, Coursera recently received $16 million in venture capital funding and $3.7 million in equity investments, bringing its total funding to over $22 million. For more information about this, see here, here, and the Coursera Press information.

Coursera offers its courses for free to anyone around the world. People who complete a course do not get college credit, but they do get a certificate of completion signed by the instructor of that course. The courses tend to include video lectures, lecture notes, interactive exercises, and peer review grading systems for any project-based assignments submitted. Two computer science professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, from Stanford University founded Coursera with the following pedagogical functions in mind:

• facilitate quick and effective learning of new concepts or material
• permit opportunities for mastery learning by offering multiple attempts for demonstration of knowledge
• facilitate the retrieval of learned material and improve long term retention
• provide immediate feedback on assignments

We can expect features that fulfill these functions out of Coursera courses, which cover topics in biology, philosophy, engineering, physics, computer science, the humanities, business, management, economics, math, statistics, medicine, education, information technology, and design. 

If you are interested in instructional technology, instructional design, or the integration of online resources into education, you might enjoy these upcoming Coursera courses:

• Charles Severance's Internet History, Technology and Security
• Fatimah Wirth's Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application
• E-Learning and Digital Cultures from the University of Edinburgh
• Kevin Werbach's Gamification
• Scott Klemmer's Human-Computer Interaction
• Jean-Paul Restoule's Aboriginal Worldviews and Education
• Michael Kearn's Networked Life

For more information about Coursera's history, goals, and activities, check out the preview of Daphne Koller's TED talk at the TEDGlobal 2012 conference on the TED Blog.

If you want to explore other e-Learning projects and Massive Online Open Courses projects, check these out (most of them offer or support free courses or lessons):


Class Central
The Khan Academy
The Minerva Project
Udacity
MIT Open Courseware
Edx
The Faculty Project
CK12
The Saylor Foundation
TED Ed
Youtube Edu
Apple iTunes U
Academic Earth
P2PU
Skillshare
Scitable
Codecademy
Open Yale
Open Culture