MOOCs
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has announced a new partnership with Coursera, an online education company that provides a platform for delivery of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). Coursera partners with the top universities around the world to offer non-credit courses online for anyone to take, for free.
UNC will produce its first MOOCs through Coursera's online platform in the fall of 2013. Five Carolina faculty members will initially offer four courses through Coursera:
- Lorraine Alexander and Karin Yeatts, Gillings School of Global Public Health: “Epidemiology: The Basic Science of Public Health”
- Evan Feldman, department of music, College of Arts and Sciences: “Fundamentals of Rehearsing Music Ensembles”
- Don Hornstein, School of Law: “Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy”
- Jeff Pomerantz, School of Information and Library Science: “Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information”
“Partnering with Coursera represents one more way we can make Carolina and the high-quality teaching of our faculty accessible to online learners. This is the next logical step to expanding our online presence along with some of the very best universities in the world. We look forward to learning from our experiences with Coursera as we continue evaluating the right approaches to online education for our campus and our future students in North Carolina and beyond.” —Chancellor Holden Thorp
As the University’s primary outreach and continuing education unit, the Friday Center will serve an ongoing role in the development of these non-credit Coursera offerings as well as continued expansion of Carolina’s credit-based online learning opportunities.
Coursera launched in April 2012 and currently offers 90 courses from some of the world’s top academic institutions, covering a broad range of disciplines, including medicine, literature, history and computer science. To date, the company has 2.8 million registered users, with nearly 1.45 million course enrollments each month. Coursera’s online course platform is available to anyone, anywhere. It uses a blend of video lecture segments, interactive quizzes, online message forums and other measures to teach students and later evaluate their mastery of subject material. For more information, visit Coursera.org
The Friday Center
Campus Box 1020
100 Friday Center Drive
Chapel Hill NC 27599-1020
Phone: 919-962-3000
Toll-free: 866-441-3683
