There’s an interesting competition shaping up between Udacity and Coursera. Specializing in offering Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), both ventures spun out of Stanford earlier this year. But they did so in very different ways. When Sebastian Thrun, Udacity’s founder, left his tenured position at Stanford, he kicked a little sand in the University’s face. And true to its name, Udacity (oh the audacity!) has positioned itself as an outsider. It isn’t partnering with established universities (so far as we know). Rather, it’s creating courses under its own brand (à la Khan Academy and The Teaching Company) and exerting top-down control over the product (à la Apple). It’s an approach that has obvious upsides and downsides.
Meanwhile, Coursera is heading down a very different path. The founders (both Stanford professors) didn’t snub their employer, and they’ve instead built a platform on which traditional universities can launch their own open courses. The downside: the company doesn’t exercise great control over the courses being built. The upside: they can leverage the brands of great universities, and the many courses they’ll build. Case in point….
Today, Coursera is announcing that they’ve signed partnership agreements with 12 new universities: Georgia Tech, Duke University, University of Washington, Caltech, Rice University, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, EPFL – Lausanne, Johns Hopkins University (School of Public Health), UCSF, University of Virginia, and the University of Illinois. That’s in addition to their four existing partners: University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, University of Michigan and Stanford.
There’s a lot of great institutions entering Coursera’s stable. And they’ll bring with them over 60 courses in the coming months. (Find a complete list of courses below the jump.) We’ll keep you posted on how Coursera and Udacity evolve, and, in the coming weeks, we’ll carefully test drive their courses and let you know the pros and cons of each. Stay tuned for more from the battle of the MOOCs.
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Udacity to Launch 5 New Courses, from Statistics to Physics. Shooting for Largest Online Class Ever.
Free Online Certificate Courses from Great Universities: A Complete List
Caltech
Drugs and the Brain
Principles of Economics for Scientists
Galaxies and Cosmology
Duke
Bioelectricity, a quantitative approach
Healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship
Introductory Human Physiology
Introduction to Genetics and Evolution
Introduction to Astronomy
Think Again: How to Reason and Argue
Medical Neuroscience
A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior
Edinburgh
AI Planning
Astrobio
Introduction to Philosophy
Equine Nutrition
Critical Thinking in Global Challenges
E-learning and Digital Cultures
Georgia Tech
Energy 101
Computational Photography
Control of Mobile Robots
Computational Investing
Digitize
UCSF
Clinical Problem Solving
Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Contraception: Choices, Culture and Consequences
EFPL
Programming Principles: Functions and Objects
Digital Signal Processing
Introducion a la programming?
Toronto
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals
Learn to Program: Crafting Quality Code
Neural Networks for Machine Learning
The Social Context of Mental Health and Illness
Aboriginal World Views in Education
Johns Hopkins
Data Analysis
Principles of Obesity Economics
Computing for Data Analysis
Mathematical Biostatistics Bootcamp
Health for All through Primary Health Care
Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Perspectives from Public Health
Community Change in Public Health
Vaccine Trials: Methods and Best Practices
Rice
Interactive Python
Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering
Analytical Chemistry
Chemistry: Concept Development and Application
Nanotechnology
University of Washington
Project Performance
Scientific Computing
Technical Leadership
The Hardware-Software Interface
Building an Information Risk Management Toolkit
Computational Methods
Computational Neuroscience
Decision Analysis in Engineering
Designing and Executing Information Security Strategies
Financial Data Modeling and Analysis in R
High-Performance Scientific Computing
Information Security and Risk MAnagement in Context
Intro to Computer Programming using Python
Introduction to Computer Communication Networks
Introduction to Data Science
Investment Science
Navigating the Business Environment
Portfolio Construction and Risk Management
Programming Languages
Sorry to be such a stickler, but
Please note: “There’s a lot of great institutions” should read “There are a lot of…” because institutions is plural.
I know language changes constantly, but we see too much of “there is…” when “there are…” would be the correct.
Thank you for your indulgence.