Carnegie Mellon Takes Online Courses to Another Level with Its Open Learning Initiative

Open online cours­es—mas­sive or otherwise—are rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing high­er edu­ca­tion by mak­ing learn­ing more and more acces­si­ble.

Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty has tak­en online cours­es to anoth­er lev­el, offer­ing vir­tu­al class­room envi­ron­ments based on deep research into how adults learn.

The cours­es are free. Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive cur­rent­ly offers 15 cours­es through a plat­form that pro­vides tar­get­ed progress feed­back to stu­dents.

The pro­gram doesn’t offer course cred­it or cer­tifi­cates but the cours­es are sophis­ti­cat­ed. CMU spent any­where from $500,000 to $1 mil­lion for each course to write the soft­ware, which includes a course builder pro­gram for instruc­tors and a sys­tem of feed­back loops that send stu­dent learn­ing data to the instruc­tor, the stu­dent and the course design team.

More than 10,000 stu­dents enrolled in OLI cours­es last year. So far CMU pro­motes OLI cours­es as sup­ple­men­tary to tra­di­tion­al class­room instruc­tion. But the cours­es are cer­tain­ly rich enough to be enjoyed by any­one. They’re most­ly in the sci­ences but include a few lan­guage and social sci­ence class­es too.

The list of cur­rent­ly-avail­able cours­es appears below. We also have them list­ed in our com­plete list of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties (many of which hap­pen to offer cer­tifi­cates too):

• Amer­i­can Eng­lish Speech
• Anato­my and Phys­i­ol­o­gy
• Argu­ment Dia­gram­ming
• Bio­chem­istry
• Ele­men­tary French 1
• Ele­men­tary French 2
• Engi­neer­ing Sta­t­ics
• Intro­duc­tion to Biol­o­gy
• Intro­duc­tion to Chem­istry
• Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy
• Log­ic and Proofs
• Media Pro­gram­ming
• Mod­ern Biol­o­gy
• Prob­a­bil­i­ty and Sta­tis­tics
• Sta­tis­ti­cal Rea­son­ing

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work on thenifty.blogspot.com and .