This coming school year the University of Toronto will offer five free courses to anyone with computer access, anywhere in the world.
Late last month the U of T announced it would be part of consortium of a dozen high-ranking universities partnering with
Coursera, the newest web platform to offer massively open online courses, or MOOCs. The only Canadian university currently participating, U of T is joined by a number of other top-tier universities including Duke University, MIT, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
With the addition of 12 new members, Coursera, founded in January 2012 by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, now has 17 universities on board, 700,000 active students and a total enrollment of 1.6 million.
Starting this fall, U of T will offer five open-access pilot courses through Coursera's web platform:
Neural Networks for Machine Learning
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals
Learn to Program: Crafting Quality Code
Aboriginal Worldviews and Education
In addition to "strengthening U of T's digital brand" and fostering dialogue between participating universities, the Coursera partnership also puts U of T at the forefront of a growing trend in higher education: open and transparent knowledge-sharing.
Coursera joins an already well established field of MOOC platforms (notably
edX and
Khan Academy), but with $22 million in funding from private investors and various university partners, Coursera is already one of the world's largest and fastest growing MOOC providers.
Cheryl Regehr, vice-provost of academic programs, says that while Coursera has a multiplicity of benefits for U of T, the push to get the school on board was really ground up, coming from faculty who wanted to make their teaching available to a wider audience.
"The [idea] really came to us when some of our professors, who were working with colleagues at other universities, particularly Stanford, came forward to say they were interested in offering a massive open online courses through this kind of a platform," says Regehr. "They were interested in making their teaching available broadly in the world and Coursera offered the perfect platform to do it. It really gets education and knowledge that is acquired here at the university or discovered here at the university out to a broader audience. It's just a really wonderful opportunity to do that beyond a city-wide level."
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Cheryl Regehr, Vice-Provost of Academic Programs, University of Toronto