Coursera partners with 10 new US universities not just for online courses, but to add MOOC to their classes too

https://www.coursera.org/course/accounting

Coursera partners with 10 new US universities not just for online courses, but to add MOOC to their classes too

Emil Protalinski 30 May 2013

Coursera today announced it has partnered with 10 US state university systems and public university flagships to bring their faculty and course content online, plus a little more. The massive open online course (MOOC) provider regularly expands the list of its schools, but this time, it’s a two-way street: the schools are going to be adding MOOC to their own courses, too, collaborating on existing content.

The startup says the goal with this latest round is to “explore the possibilities” of using MOOC technology and content to “improve completion, quality, and access to higher education,” both across the combined audiences of these schools (approximately 1.25 million enrolled students) as well as among Coursera’s global classroom of learners (over 3.6 million as of May 2013). The schools are already pushing pilot programs, which will be evaluated based on their effectiveness in enhancing student success.The institutions who intend to join Coursera’s network include:

State University of New York (SUNY)

Tennessee Board of Regents

University of Tennessee Systems

University of Colorado System

University of Houston System

University of Kentucky

University of Nebraska

University of New Mexico

University System of Georgia

West Virginia University

Unlike past partners, these institutions aren’t just joining to bring their own content online for the general population; they are looking reap the benefits of MOOC-based content in their own classrooms and on their own campuses. Coursera gives the example of one professor creating a MOOC, allowing his or her students to watch lectures at home and do more interactive and group-based activities during the lecture time, and then another one adding in his or her own readings, homework, and supplemental material, and offering the joint package to his or her students.

Coursera argues that this will encourage new methods and enhance previous approaches to teaching both on-campus and online, allowing faculty to try improving upon existing “blended learning,” which combines online video lectures and content with active, in-person classroom interactions. Professors and universities won’t only be able to create, modify, or add to curriculums, and examine best practices from the community, they will also be able to tap into Coursera’s data analytics, which can identify learning obstacles and recognize gaps in subject matter.

“We think the coming decade will see a transformation in the way education is delivered, where teachers and online content come together to better serve students on campus and beyond,” Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller said in a statement. “With this announcement, we take a step further in our goal to expand quality education to all,” Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng added.

The bigger picture here is that this should bring MOOCs and mainstream institutions even closer together, as well as expand the community of excellent educators providing MOOCs to the world. It also opens up new channels for sharing knowledge and resources between professors, across campuses, and among entire state university systems.

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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