Saturday, July 28, 2012

A Great Place for Free Online Learning - Coursera



Coursera is a great place for online learning. This has subjects varying from Computer Science to History , Sociology, Medicine and Music. All the subjects are offered from the top ranked Universities in the world. Currently there are 16 Universities affiliated with Coursera and this includes MIT, CIT , Stanford University and Princeton University.




Some available courses 
The courses offered are well organized. Around 5-12 hours per week are required to complete a course and the duration of the course will be 6-16 weeks. Almost all the courses includes weekly lectures which have a duration of around 10-20 minutes. There will be several lectures per week adding up to 2 hours per week. Also there may be weekly quizzes, assignments or programming assignment depending on the course. Quizzes will either MCQ or short answers which will be evaluated automatically. Assignments are normally peer reviewed. Also most of the courses have an end exam and mid exams.After the completion of the course participants will receive a certificate if they have performed well in exams and assignments. But this certificate will not be considered as an official certificate offered by the relevant University.

Coursera is started by Andrew Ng, an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and Daphne Koller a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University . Although this was started in this year it has many partners. Currently all the courses are free and the business model is not finalized. It is expected that it will be something about selling the information about participants to potential employees and offering of certificates.

Currently Coursera offers more than 100 different subjects. The number of enrollments per subject some times exceeds 100k. These courses will give a very good chance to learn some thing new in a very organized manner. The quality of the courses are very high and it is very good chance to experience the future of e-learning. This will be a very good opportunity to gather international quality knowledge freely.Visit the Coursera web site from the following link.


https://www.coursera.org/

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