Coursera Adds Humanities Courses, Raises $16 Million, Strikes Deal with 3 Universities

in Online Courses | April 18th, 2012 5 Comments

Dur­ing the past two months, two ven­tures offer­ing free MOOCS (Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es) have spun out of Stan­ford. One is Udac­i­ty run by Sebas­t­ian Thrun. And the oth­er is Cours­era, which announced a slew of big news today.

To start with, it raised $16 mil­lion in fund­ing from ven­ture cap­i­tal firms Klein­er Perkins Cau­field & Byers and New Enter­prise Asso­ciates.

Next it announced agree­ments to offer cours­es by Prince­ton, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan (in addi­tion to Stan­ford).

And final­ly it has added human­i­ties cours­es to its upcom­ing fall cur­ricu­lum — a depar­ture from the MOOC norm of only offer­ing cours­es in com­put­er sci­ence & engi­neer­ing. Cours­es include:

The cours­es will get start­ed in the Fall. In the mean­time, don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, MIT, Yale, Har­vard, Oxford and beyond.


by | Permalink | Comments (5) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (5)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Saurabh says:
    April 18, 2012 at 8:44 pm

    Oh. My. Good­ness. A top-notch world-class edu­ca­tion has just been rede­fined to the point of blow­ing major par­a­digms here!

    Reply
  • Muvaffak GOZAYDIN says:
    April 24, 2012 at 2:06 am

    What you do is great .

    But 200,000,000 col­lege age peo­ple of the world includ­ing USA col­lege ages are after a degree to make liv­ing.

    We have to find a mod­el to award degrees from top schools , for the sake of qual­i­ty , to online learn­ers at a small fee. $ 10 per course .

    Reply
  • Teri says:
    May 2, 2012 at 10:46 am

    Or bet­ter yet, we stop requir­ing pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive, oft-emp­ty degrees and start look­ing for skill-flex com­pe­ten­cies in hir­ing process­es instead.

    Reply
  • Muvaffak GOZAYDIN says:
    August 3, 2012 at 6:21 am

    TERI
    1.- For sure we must stop pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive, oft-emp­ty degrees from unknown col­leges with­out qual­i­ty.

    2.- Skill flex com­pe­ten­cies can be gained from MITx + Har­vardx cer­tifi­cate pro­grams as well at a small fee from the top schools of the world, no wor­ry about qual­i­ty, all employ­ers accept those skills ver­i­fied by MITx and Har­vardx and now UC Berke­ley. Go to http://www.edx.org to reg­is­ter. This fall is free but prob­a­bly next spring will have a fee of $ 10 , not bad.

    Reply
  • Muvaffak GOZAYDIN says:
    August 3, 2012 at 6:30 am

    I am against Cours­era.
    Can you imag­ine a busi­ness with­out a busi­ness plan .
    They do not know how to finance the busi­ness yet.
    It is sim­ple
    — Have mil­lion stu­dents, can they ?
    — Be glob­al, inter­na­tion­al.
    — Charge only $ 10–20 per course
    — Make mil­lion dol­lars every semes­ter

    I have anoth­er sug­ges­tion
    Not every­body can go to MIT and Har­vard pro­grams, cours­es are very dif­fu­cult .

    So Cours­era should tar­get stu­dents des­ti­nat­ed for less com­pet­i­tive schools such as good but less com­pet­i­tive school,
    Uni of Illi­nois, PennState, Uni of Michi­gan, Uni of Edin­borogh and the like.
    I am sure Cours­era can find more stu­dents in this cat­e­go­ry .
    But please only qual­i­ty schools.
    MITx + Har­vardx tar­get­ed 1 bil­lion in the world , Cours­era must tar­get for the sec­ond bil­lion .
    That is a must . ONLINE works only glob­al­ly, with mil­lion stu­dents .

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Quantcast