Saturday, September 22, 2012

17 More Universities on Coursera

This video is from the Coursera YouTube Channel.


The video above previews a free online course that Steve Everett from Emory University will teach via the Coursera course management system about digital sound design. The course explores fundamental factors and principles of sound and auditory perception, and it covers techniques for recording, mixing, processing, synthesizing, sampling, analyzing, and editing digital audio. Everett's course is one of the three currently offered on Coursera from Emory University.

Emory is one of 17 universities that recently signed agreements with Coursera about offering free online courses in topics like applied biology, medicine, music, personal finance, economics, business, computer programming, explorations in the humanities, and more. The last time Coursera added this many partners was in mid-July, and if this round of additions to Coursera will mirror the last, then we'll see additional courses added from these 17 universities over the next few months. Each currently offers at least a few.

Another interesting Coursera course, at least for those interested in how online courses include different textual, multimedia and interactive elements, is Jay Clayton's course, Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative. This course will explore what happens when online multiplayer video games are modeled after art, novels or movies. The class will feature 10-20 minute long video lectures, written assignments, and in-game interactive assignments as it focuses on the free-to-play elements of The Lord of the Rings Online game

Rather than offer course credit, Coursera courses offer students and people around the world certificates of course completion that may be signed by the course instructor upon course completion. In August, Coursera encountered plagiarism cases with some of its online courses, but it has made some changes to its courses, including an honor code, to help discourage plagiarism. Check out these articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education for more in-depth discussions about Coursera and plagiarism:


It will be interesting to see what Coursera, which started up earlier this year, holds for us in the future months. 

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