Coursera Blog

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University Join Coursera

helloyinner — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:14:00 -0400

We are pleased to announce that the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University (TAU) have become members of Coursera’s network of educational partners, and will soon offer free online courses to anyone in the world. These two universities will join 80 universities and other educational institutions, including fellow Israeli institution and current partner Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to promote learning without limits through our platform.

As of today, the Technion and TAU will develop an initial offering of four courses, which span the subjects of engineering, archaeology, biology and cultural studies.

The Technion’s first course will be offered in English and Arabic:

• Nanotechnology and Nanosensors, taught by Professor Hossam Haick of the Wolfson Department of Chemical Engineering

TAU’s initial course offerings will be in English, including:

• The Rise and Fall of Jerusalem - Judah Under Babylonian Rule, taught by Professor Oded Lipschits, Ph.D., Director, Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology in the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures

• What A Plant Knows (and other things you didn’t know about plants), taught by Professor Daniel Chamovitz, Ph.D., Director, Manna Center for Plant Biosciences in the Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants

• The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, taught by Professor Asher Susser, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow in the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies

Prof. Raanan Rein, Tel Aviv University’s Vice President, welcomed the agreement with Coursera, saying “This initiative reflects Tel Aviv University’s ongoing commitment to innovation in teaching and greater global outreach”.

“We are excited about joining the Coursera initiative, which will not only give us the opportunities to contribute to society, it will also pave the way to improve our on-campus teaching,” commented Professor Danny Lewin, Assistant to the Senior Vice President for the Promotion of Teaching at the Technion.

“It is an honor for me to be working with two of the best universities in my birth country, to provide students access to great education, free of cost,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. “Tel Aviv and the Technion will now be able to reach students in Israel and around the world, spreading their knowledge and expertise to thousands more people than ever before possible.”

The Coursera Store: Supporting Education for Everyone

helloyinner — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 04:24:00 -0400

The Coursera Store is Finally here!

Coursera’s mission is to empower people to learn without limits by connecting the world to a great education. It is with this in mind that we share some news with you!

It’s an exciting day for the Coursera community because we are proud to announce that you’ll finally have a chance to get your hands on some Coursera gear, and better yet, you’ll be able to help a fellow Courserian while you’re at it. Introducing the brand-new Coursera Store! The store is where you can go to get Coursera gear, like the much demanded Coursera T-Shirt, Mug, Water Bottle, along with 3 more items.

Please note that due to the small size of our store, shipping is currently available within the US only. As we get more inventory, we plan to make shipping available worldwide — thank you for your understanding.

Introducing The Education for Everyone Initiative

Along with the opening of Coursera Store, we are launching the Education for Everyone (E4E) Initiative, an effort to engage our community to work together and break down the financial barriers to learning without limits. When we launched Signature Track, our service that allows students to earn a Verified Certificate for select courses, we began offering Coursera Financial Aid to ensure that no student would be excluded due to financial constraints. To date we have provided financial aid to thousands of students from around the world who are motivated to learn.

Through the E4E Initiative, 100% of the profit from your Coursera Store purchase goes to our Coursera Financial Aid program. This will help to pay the fees for students wanting to join Signature Track but are unable to afford to do so. As part of the E4E initiative, every Coursera Store order will include a token of thanks in the form of a special E4E sticker to show that you’re support the principle that education should be a fundamental human right, be proud and display it!

Who benefits from Coursera Financial Aid?

We’ve heard from students all over the world whose lives have been changed by Coursera. Many have applied for Coursera Financial Aid in pursuit of a Verified Certificate, which has the potential to help them advance in their careers and reach their educational or personal goals.

Siddarth, a student from India signed up for Signature Track for his course, Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies from the University of Maryland. He shared his story of why Financial Aid was important to him:

“My annual income is $0 because I am a student. Also, I am joining college this fall and the expenses for college will be quite a burden for my parents. I don’t want to strain my parents already fiscally-tight pockets… This course will help me learn more about entrepreneurship. It will assist me in creating jobs when there are none available. I rely on this course to help me turn my innovation and my ideas into successful business ventures.”

We also heard from Mukhtar, a Courserian from Nigerian taking Sports and Society from Duke University, who hopes to use his Verified Certificate to help his community and reach his career goals:

“My parents are getting old and kind of struggling to make a living, so they can’t afford to spend money to help me with my education. I am getting ready to look for a job in Nigeria so that motivates me to look more into certification courses since I can’t afford to go for my masters degree… I am really looking into working with our national sports council in my country and as a volunteer in my community to help the upbringing talents. I hope my getting a certificate in this course can help me in that endeavor.”

Siddarth and Mukhtar’s motivations are powerful, and we’re happy to be able to provide free access to education to them and many others like them. As the Coursera community continues to grow, we hope to be able to sustain our Financial Aid program with the support for the Education for Everyone Initiative.

Visit Coursera Store!

Do Your Homework!

helloyinner — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:58:00 -0400

Editor’s note: Jonathan Haber is a Courserian who is taking classes on Coursera to experiment with a project of his called “Degree of Freedom”. He is guest blogging on our site throughout this next year to keep us up-to-date on his progress and offer useful study tips!

As I close in on the end of the sophomore year at my Degree of Freedom One Year BA project, one of the things that stands out is the important role course components such as reading, quizzes, peer-graded essays and other assignments have played in the overall Coursera learning experience.

Homework, tests and other sorts of assignments fulfill a critical function in all modes of learning. But in MOOC classes, they provide one of the most important ways for students to interact with the material to reinforce our learning while also demonstrating what we know.

This short video provides some suggestions for how to get the most out of these components of a MOOC class:

Those interested in reading more about testing can begin here, and those who want to dig a bit deeper into peer-graded assignments can start here. And speaking of homework, it’s time to start grading the creative projects that were assigned to my Coursera class on Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity (which reminds me of another important component of things like peer-graded assignments: that they let you contribute to the class by playing the role of teacher as well as student).

Ciao for now!

University of Chicago Joins Coursera

helloyinner — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:30:00 -0400

Today we’re happy to announce that the University of Chicago is joining Coursera’s network of 80 national and international educational partners currently offering free online courses to millions of Courserians. The University of Chicago shares with Coursera a commitment to providing faculty with the best resources to serve students in the classroom and across the world, and we’re delighted to work with them as they experiment with our platform and digital learning tools to improve on-campus teaching as well as reach a new audience of learners.

The University of Chicago will offer an initial two courses on Coursera’s platform, with plans to expand their offerings based on faculty interest. The following courses, taught by renowned professors in their fields, will build out Coursera’s catalog in the areas of science and business:

Global Warming, taught by David Archer: Professor in Geophysical Sciences and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. This course is one of the University of Chicago’s most popular, and will introduce students to theories, views and studies around global warming, climate change and human involvement.

Asset Pricing Theory, taught by John Cochrane: AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business. This advanced course, designed for doctoral students in economics and finance, will now be available to anyone around the world working within the finance industry who wishes to continue their studies and learn from one of the top experts in asset pricing.

“This class is a unique, high-level class, offering a view and integration of the material that you can’t easily get anywhere else,” Cochrane said, “I hope it will thus advertise the university’s special strengths as well as be a useful resource in itself.”

“We’re delighted to welcome the University of Chicago, with its tremendous strengths in a broad range of disciplines, into the Coursera network. We look forward to working with the University as its faculty members explore the benefits of online education within their own classrooms, and share their knowledge with the world beyond,” said Daphne Koller of Coursera.

To find out more about the University of Chicago’s course offerings on Coursera, and to sign up today, visit Coursera.org/Chicago.

Not Impossible: The Story of Daniel, a 17 Year Old with Severe Autism & His 6 Completed Coursera Courses

helloyinner — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 12:17:00 -0400

This is a post by Michael, Daniel’s father. Daniel is a 17 year old who has severe Autism. Daniel has, over the past year, taken and completed 6 Coursera courses. Their journey warmed our hearts and we asked Michael to share it with the Coursera community. We hope you enjoy Daniel’s story as much as we have.

It is impossible to overstate the benefit and happiness that Coursera has brought to our son Daniel and our family.

Five years ago (next month) our severely autistic son Daniel had a major breakthrough. Then twelve years old, with a using vocabulary of thirty or forty words (though we knew he understood far more) he suddenly learned to answer questions by picking the answers out, one letter at a time, on a letterboard. Within a couple of weeks, Daniel could use the thousands of words he had heard but could not speak.

The teacher who created this breakthrough, Soma Mukhopadhyay, also taught us how to read to Daniel: read him a sentence, stop, ask him a comprehension question, get his answer on the letter board, go on to the next sentence, ask another question…

Reading one sentence at a time makes for slow going, so to make it worthwhile for both of us I started reading Danny A Midsummer Nights Dream which is delightful at that pace. Daniel had great difficulty with reading that went too fast, but once I went slowly enough it didn’t seem to matter how difficult the content was! Soon my “comprehension” questions went beyond “what’s happening” and became about rhyme, symbolism, metaphor and dramatic structure. It didn’t matter to Daniel: as long as he was answering questions, he was following the story, and the tougher the questions the more he loved it. By the end of the seven months it took us to finish the play, Dan had become an expert close reader, a skill which would enable him to take Al Filreis’ Modern & Contemporary American Poetry class, the Coursera class that changed his life again four years later.

By the time someone sent me Daphne Koller’s TED talk and we discovered Coursera, we were well into the groove of teaching Dan at home. Dan loved learning and kept steering us towards subjects where he would be asked to compare ideas because connecting different pieces of information into knowlege made him feel, as he spelled to us, “less autistic.” Dan is eager to go to school, but is unable to sit still quietly in a classroom, and unable to communicate abstract thought except by letterboard. Even more limiting, he is dependent on an adult to bring him to the task, keep him working on it, and hold his hand while he spells. Coursera seemed like a possible bridge between home schooling and what Dan called “going to a real school,” but it turned out to be much more.

In September of 2012 there were not yet many humanities courses on Coursera (remember Dan wants to be made to compare ideas, so the humanities are better for that than many hard science classes) so I helped him sign up for two courses from University of Pennsylvania: Al Filreis’ Modern Poetry, known to its legions of worldwide fans as ModPo, and Peter Struck’s Greek and Roman Mythology.

Dan received many shocks and rose to many occasions. The biggest shock was having to keep up. It had taken us months to read our first Shakespeare play and now I had two weeks to read Dan The Odyssey. Until Coursera, my wife Meredith and I had been so thrilled that Dan could understand literature that we gave him as much time as he needed. Coursera ended that luxury with a bang. True, the online lecture format made it easy for me to stop the video and ask Dan questions, and we could repeat things he didn’t get the first time, but basically Dan had to keep up. And he wanted to keep up and that was a tremendous growth experience. He discovered that he could understand the Odyssey with only two or three comprehension questions per book and keep up the relentless pace of a college course, studying whether he was in the mood or not (special ed can be very forgving. Dan loved having an objective standard he had to keep up with).

Then there were the quizzes. After the first one or two we stopped reading the questions aloud and started dragging his finger across the question on screen. He would then respond by tapping the answer on the screen. Dan can’t use a mouse but we quickly discovered that if we got the quiz on an iPad the touchscreen enabled him to read and answer the questions on his own. Once or twice he realized that he could make a case for more than one of the offered quiz answers being right and he discovered the phenomenon of second-guessing the professor. The in-lecture quizzes are always easy for him becase they are like the stopping to ask a comprehension question, which he knows so well.

Then there were the online essays to write and peer-review. Although Dan doesn’t yet read for pleasure on his own he learned to read the 500-800 -word essays of his classmates, and this young man for whom writing a couple of sentences on the letterboard had been a big deal began to be able to write and construct an argument in logical order. As a peer reviewer he experienced the anguish of hating a badly written essay but not wanting to give a failing grade. He glowed with pride when his peers gave him high marks, and suffered the one time he got a less-than-passing grade from his peers (he did well enough on the other essays that he still passed the course). When it occurred to him that he could write an essay about Frank O’Hara in the style of a Frank O’Hara poem he was filled with pride and he waited in suspense to see whether his peers would like it (they did).

The Coursera Honor Code made a big impression on him. One day I winced at one of Dan’s quiz choices and he spelled out “I see now that answer two is correct, but leave it wrong because that was my choice.”

Dan has now earned six certificates and has learned from dipping into several other courses as well. It’s a great introduction to college learning. It is something new in the world for an undergraduate —especially a seventeen year old autistic one— to be able to study Ancient Greek literature from very different points of view at Penn, Wesleyan and the University of Virginia. This whole world is new to him: standards, peers, comradeship and competition. And with his induction into this world came something that would surprise some critics of MOOCs: Daniel experienced a dramatic decrease in his sense of isolation. There are emails and forum posts and people who accept Dan despite (or ignoring) his autism. But there are also in-the-flesh encounters stemming initially from Al Filreis’ commitment to openness and his invitation to his students to drop by Kelly Writers House at Penn. We took Dan there and Al spent time with him, and the TAs, familiar from the video lectures, were friendly and accepting and Dan began to get a sense that there might be a community he could be part of some day that had nothing to do with autism. Emboldened by meeting Professor Filreis, Danny asked me to write to Peter Struck and he met us too. We have hopes of meeting all Dan’s professors — and one is in Jerusalem and several are in Edinburgh! Some of the 49 Courserians who are Danny’s Facebook friends will probably become non-virtual friends in time.

He even had a moment of stardom. We took him to the ModPo final webcast at Penn, and at one point one of the TAs asked members of the audience to pick two words that encapsulated their ModPo experience. Dan’s were “not impossible” and under Al Filreis’ gentle urging he managed to say those words aloud to however many hundreds of people were watching around the world. Someone made a forum topic out if it and for 72 hours “Not impossible” was the top thread on the ModPo forum as people wrote in from all over saying that Dan had inspired them and that “not impossible” was going to be their new watchword. Can you imagine what it does for a person like Daniel to feel useful?

Click here to watch Daniel recite his poem “Not Impossible” at 1:43:00

So it seems as if every element which Coursera has invented to make its online courses more college-like has had some role to play in the reduction of this one teenager’s disability.

Daniel’s Coursera password is built around the word “cure” and he has a point.

As I finish this post, I am going to Daniel’s room to read him he rest the rest of Book 24 of the Iliad. When we are finished we will re-watch “Professor Andy’s” lecture from Wesleyan’s The Ancient Greeks course. The material is similar, in some ways to the material in Peter Struck’s “Greek and Roman Mythology” course from Penn, so it does Daniel good to compare and contrast not only Achilles and Hector but also the two courses. Plato’s Apology is discussed in the Wesleyan course and also in “Know Thyself” from the University of Virginia. edX now offers Professor Nagy’s course which studies the Iliad from a completely different point of view. This highlights an astonishing aspect of MOOCs. Decades ago when I was an undergraduate, I would have accepted the idea that any educated person would have to study, at least a little, the literature that has come down to us from Ancient Greece. But who ever got the chance to experience and compare the subject as taught at Penn, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan and Harvard? At the age of 17?

What Daniel will do with all this remains to be seen. But the fact that he will have a chance to do it is a gift from Coursera.

10 US State University Systems and Public Institutions Join Coursera to Explore MOOC-based Learning and Collaboration on Campus

helloyinner — Wed, 29 May 2013 23:15:00 -0400

Over the past year, MOOCs have opened the doors of access to quality education, and have captured the attention of educational leaders and students worldwide. Today, we’re excited to announce the next step in our mission to foster student learning without limits and expand the possibilities that MOOCs and online education can enable.

The big news is that we have begun working with 10 US state university systems and public schools to explore the possibilities of using MOOC technology and content to improve completion, quality, and access to higher education, both across the schools’ combined audiences of approximately 1.25 million physically enrolled students and among Coursera’s global classroom of learners. Here’s a full list of the new institutions that are joining Coursera’s platform:

By working with these institutions, we hope to motivate and encourage new methods and enhance previous approaches to teaching on-campus and online. Professors teaching at these schools will have the opportunity to develop online courses through Coursera, as well as adapt existing Coursera courses for their own classrooms.

So, what does this mean for students?

The partnership with Coursera will give professors the option to experiment with and improve upon the “blended learning” model, which combines online video lectures and content with active, in-person classroom interactions. Studies have shown many benefits to blended learning, including improved classroom participation. Pilot programs, which will be offered at several joining institutions, will be evaluated for their effectiveness in enhancing student success.

Additionally, this collaboration opens up opportunities for institutions to consider for-credit offerings for non-matriculated students interested in continuing their education, but who might not have access to campus resources. Institutions can use Coursera’s platform to create MOOCs that allow learners to have access to course content, and potentially receive credentials upon completion.

Moreover, faculty at various institutions will be able share content and adapt it to suit the needs of their own students. As an example, this capability can greatly enhance high school dual enrollment programs, allowing matriculated high-school students to take university-level courses which are transferrable for college credit.

Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the nation’s largest system of public higher education, The State University of New York, said: “This new partnership with Coursera will be invaluable as we launch Open SUNY, which will give our students increased access to the online courses SUNY faculty offer in New York and worldwide. Working with Coursera presents a fantastic opportunity for higher education systems across the country to increase educational access, instructional quality and exposure, and degree completion. We are proud to be a part of this effort and look forward to getting started.”

“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. With this announcement, we take a step further in our goal to expand quality education to all,” said Andrew and Daphne, Coursera’s Co-CEO’s.

What's Your Study Strategy?

helloyinner — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:16:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: Pamela Fox is Coursera’s Lead Student Team Engineer.

Last week, thanks to the course calendar, I realized that my final exam for Ariely’s class on Irrational Behavior was due the night before a Google I/O talk that I would be giving the next day about Coursera - frankly, I was a little stressed. I’d never made it so far in a Coursera class, and I was determined to make it to the end!

I freaked out: how was I going to study for the exam? I love learning new things, but I forget them quickly when I move onto the next cool new thing to learn, and I didn’t have the time or patience to rewatch every lecture. I needed to review the materials somehow, but I never took any notes. Fortunately, I have tens of thousands of classmates, and a number of them *did* take notes, and they shared them in our forums. Our always-helpful TA wrote up a post with links to all the student-sourced resources to make them easy to find, so I opened them up in my browser tabs and set about to find the most efficient way for me to review the last 6 weeks of material.

Visual Notes

Some people learn best by sketching out mind maps connecting all the ideas in a lecture, and two students in the class shared their notes online - Albert Gascon and Ivan Staroversky. You can see a mind map by Albert of the first lecture below:

I personally have never tried making or studying from mind maps, and though I was very impressed by how well they mapped out the concepts, I realized I wouldn’t have enough time to review all of the information presented in this format so I researched other options.

Lecture Notes

We provide students in every class with a wiki that they can use for whatever they’d like, and some students used the Ariely wiki to summarize the lectures with succinct bullet points:

Another group of students, who called themselves the “on a tight deadlines” group, created a shared Google Drive to upload lectures notes, both written and visual:

I’m a fast reader, so I loved the bullet point notes format, and read through all of them as my initial review. But, I still wanted a way to test my knowledge. How much did I actually rememeber?

Quiz Cards

Luckily, I discovered one student created a set of 107 Quizlet flash cards based on the glossary in the class wiki. Sounded perfect to me - not too many, not too few - so I began reviewing them.

Now, as it turns out, I’ve written my own quiz cards app, so in the spirit of practicing the “Not Invented Here” syndrome that we discussed in class, I took a break from studying to port the cards over to QuizCards. I started off by quizzing myself in multiple choice mode, and after a round of that, I moved on to the “autocomplete” mode, which forces me to recall without having to type an exact term. If I didn’t immediately remember the term, I’d Google it and read whatever wikipedia paper came up, and that was enough to remind me of what we learnt about it.

My app uses the Leitner system, where flash cards are in 5 buckets and moved from one bucket to the next with each correct answering, and back to the first bucket on an incorrect answer.

When it was nearly 1am and I had half the cards in the 4th bucket, I decided it was exam time! After all, I didn’t want to be under *too much* stress for the exam, since as we all know from Yerkes-Dodson law, too much stress can lead to decrease in performance for mentally difficult tasks. I won’t find out for a few days how well I did, but I felt pretty good about my answers, and I would have been nowhere near as prepared without the lecture notes and flash cards.

How about you?

This is the first time in years that I’ve studied for any sort of exam (besides a technical job interview, which is sort of an exam). I’m so thankful to my fellow students for the work they put into the study materials, and I hope that there are such helpful students in other classes. What’s been your experience with studying for Coursera exams?

Yale University Joins Coursera

helloyinner — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:03:00 -0400

Today we are proud to welcome Yale University to Coursera’s network, bringing the total number of educational partners offering courses on our platform up to 70. Yale has long supported open education, particularly through its initiative Open Yale Courses, and we are pleased to partner with them to extend their knowledge to the millions of Courserians around the world, for free.

With today’s announcement, Yale will be bringing onto Coursera’s platform four initial courses, taught by renowned professors and experts in their fields. These offerings include:

• Roman Architecture, taught by Diana E. E. Kleiner: Dunham Professor of History of Art and Classics. This is a course for people who love to travel—in actuality and virtually—to a wide variety of places and we will do that together as we explore the great buildings and engineering marvels of Rome and its vast empire in their ancient and contemporary contexts.

• Financial Markets, taught by Robert J. Shiller: Sterling Professor of Economics. This course will provide an overview of the ideas, methods, and institutions that permit human society to manage risks and foster enterprise.

• Moralities of Everyday Life, taught by Paul Bloom: Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science. How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.

• Constitutional Law, taught by Akhil Reed Amar: Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science. An introduction to the main themes of the American Constitution—popular sovereignty, separation of powers, federalism, and rights—and to basic techniques of constitutional interpretation.

“We are delighted by the chance to have Yale faculty work with Coursera to extend the reach of their teaching beyond the campus,” said Peter Salovey, President-elect, Yale University. “My colleagues admire Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng’s vision for sharing high quality course materials for free around the world, and we look forward to being a part of Coursera’s growing network.”

“We’re delighted at the opportunity to work with Yale as they continue to build on their leadership role in the space of online education and expand the reach of their knowledge and expertise to a growing community of global learners,” said Coursera’s Daphne Koller.

To find out more about the courses, and to sign up today, visit Coursera.org/Yale.

Coursera Partnering with Top Global Organizations Supporting Translation Around the World

helloyinner — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:09:00 -0400

Editor’s note: The following post is the press release for our brand new Global Translation Partners program!

Coursera, a leading Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider, is announcing a partnership with ten top organizations from eight countries to translate complete course lectures across multiple disciplines for students around the world, for free.

Leading translation companies, philanthropic organizations, mobile carriers, nonprofits, corporations and universities have joined forces in this partnership, including Digital October, Es Corporation, Kcell, Koc University, Lemann Foundation, Meedan, New Thinking, Taghreedat, and Victor Pinchuk Foundation. The organizations will begin translating select courses into many of the most popular language markets reflected by Coursera students: Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and Arabic. Each Coursera Global Translation Partner will begin by translating 3-5 select courses, with the majority of translated courses being available by September 2013.

Additionally, Coursera is partnering with Transifex to use their continuous localization platform. Transifex’s cloud-based tool will host Coursera’s translatable content and allow these organizations and individuals to easily contribute course translations from anywhere.

Students can log in to Coursera and check class landing pages for updated information on translation offerings in the coming months. For the time being, course lectures will be translated via subtitles while all other course material, including quizzes and assignments, will remain in the course’s original language. Coursera’s long-term goal is to have our platform localized to global audiences.

Since Coursera launched, the company has been taking large strides to connect people with a great education and help students learn without limits. Over the past few months, Coursera has welcomed 29 new universities to its platform, in addition to 6 educational institutions and museums, bringing the total number of participating institutions up to 69. The new additions include 16 international schools that offer courses in Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish. In April 2013, Coursera also kicked off a pilot translation project with Russian organization Digital October.

Now, by joining forces with top organizations globally to produce fully translated course lectures, Coursera and our translation partners are taking a giant leap forward toward making high-quality education accessible to anyone, anywhere — regardless of what language they speak.

Below is a visual representation of the locations of our Global Translation Partner Organizations

To see the full interactive map, please click here

Learn more!

5 Tips: Learn more effectively in class with Mastery Learning

helloyinner — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:36:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: Want to learn a few tips on how to learn the material in your classes more effectively? Read below to learn about the principles behind Mastery Learning, written by our Course Operations MOOC Pedagogy Specialist, Relly Brandman.

What is Mastery Learning?

“The instruction is the same as in the conventional class (usually with the same teacher)…The average student under mastery learning was about one standard deviation above the average of the control class (the average mastery learning student was above 84% of the students in the control class).¹”

In traditional classrooms, students progress through the class regardless of their level of achievement. In mastery learning classrooms, students must fully understand (demonstrate mastery of) the material before moving on to the next topic. Mastery learning is about how students navigate through exercises and assignments.

In a seminal study by Benjamin Bloom¹, a mastery learning approach was found to improve the distribution of student scores by a full standard deviation above the control class that used the same method of instruction but didn’t require that students master the material before moving on.

Figure 1: Achievement distribution for students in traditional, mastery learning, and individual tutoring instruction. Mastery learning results in one standard deviation above the average of the control class (the average mastery learning student was above 84% of the students in the control class)¹.

What does mastery learning look like on Coursera classes?

On Coursera, many instructors allow students to have multiple attempts on a single quiz, allowing you to take quizzes several times until you thoroughly understand the material. Instructors have the option to use randomized quiz questions so that students see a different set of questions with each attempt. Mastery learning is characterized by both the opportunity to practice the material, as well as the benchmark for knowing when you’ve mastered the material (e.g. a high score on the quiz).

Martin Odersky (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) allowed students to take the quizzes as many times as they wanted in his Functional Programming Principles in Scala course. Many students kept taking the quiz until they received 100%, much like playing a game. This, of course, led to higher scores for that particular quiz. But students who chose to improve their scores by taking the quiz multiple times did better on their first attempts future quizzes as well. For students of similar current performance, mastery-based score improvements correlate with future performance (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Mastery-based score improvements correlate with future performance for students of similar current performance in Martin Odersky’s (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) Functional Programming Principles in Scala.

I’m a student. How can I use this method to improve my learning?

Keep practicing each class concept until you have mastered it, before moving on to the next concept. If there are multiple attempts allowed for the quizzes and exams in your course, think carefully through each attempt and keep trying until you do really well. Look for as many opportunities as possible to practice, like extra problem sets, background reading, and discussions on the forums. Set clear benchmarks and test yourself on key concepts before moving on to the next. Below are 5 tips to get you started!

Five tips for students to start using Mastery Learning techniques today!

Chose the topic/module that you want to be a master of (this will likely be found in the course syllabus).
Write down explicit learning objectives. If these are provided to you by the instructor, re-write them in your own words. If they’re not provided to you by the instructor, consider discussing and honing your learning objectives with your fellow students on the dicussion forums or in your study group.
Practice, practice, practice! Take and re-take the quizzes available to you, look for extra-practice problems, create practice problems with your study group, etc. Think carefully through each attempt so that you’re getting the most out of your practice.
Benchmark: figure out if you’ve mastered the material by your performance on the quiz and your ability to address each of the learning objectives. Work with your study group to test each other and give each other feedback.
Celebrate! Now that you’re a master of the material, you have built a solid foundation for moving on to the next topic.

We hope you enjoyed reading about this topic. Happy learning!

________
¹“The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring.” B. Bloom, Educational Researcher (1984).

“Online Educational Journey: My Travelogue”

helloyinner — Thu, 09 May 2013 20:21:00 -0400

Editors note: We are happy to share this guest post from Sankalp, a student who recently completed Calculus: Single Variable and received a Verified Certificate and completed the College Credit Recommendation Exam. A new session of the course starts on May 24th - You can learn more and sign up here.

Hi, I’m Sankalp. I am 17 and I live in Mumbai, India. I have been learning online, through videos for quite a few years, and have seen almost all the modern inflection points in online education. I have genuinely completed 2 MOOCs on Coursera (lurked through many, that’s the beauty of this platform!), Introduction to Mathematical Thinking (Stanford, Prof Keith Devlin) and Calculus: Single Variable (UPenn, Prof Robert Ghrist – incl. Signature Track and proctored exam for ACE CREDIT). Here is my journey and perspective:

History – “Those good old days - learning begins”

Giving some stress on my memory, I recall that my journey began when I was in 8th grade, more than 3 years ago, I got access to Lynda.com videos. I managed to master Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash through these videos. Then one fine day, I was assigned a project in the 9th grade by my teacher to prepare a presentation on the “Pre-Historic Period”. I used Flash, along with animations, complex object oriented programming via Action Script etc. That was the first time I felt that knowledge is indeed useful! That gave me the motivation to learn more, the motivation to go beyond what the school teaches, and that 9th grade motivation still drives me. Later, I came to know of a Khantastic website called as the Khan Academy. Before I realized, I got addicted to the whole concept of online education. By the vacations of 9th grade, I was done with most of PreCalculus, Trig, Probability etc. all the way up to Calculus.

Coursera – “Online Learning 2.0 – nothing less than a dream”

I am a big fan of TED, it has introduced so many things to me, KhanAcademy, Wolfram Alpha and then Coursera! I watched Prof. Daphne Koller’s TED talk and landed up on Coursera. The moment I saw the website, I had a smile on my face, knowing that this is something significant! I had a beautiful experience with Intro to Mathematical Thinking (ITMT). The most striking feature of the course were the discussion forums. Also, math takes time, and the video platform allowed me to pause Prof Devlin several times, I made him repeat several times and that’s how I could catch hold of the rigorous material. Check out my video made for ITMT here.

Due to the effects of my first MOOC, I decided to take my second MOOC all the more seriously. It was called Calculus: Single Variable, offered by Prof Ghrist. Although I had some calculus experience before thanks to the KhanAcademy, I still needed one complete package at a deeper level. And prof/g’s calculus course, I must say, is one of the *best* courses on Coursera. Not only is the material fantastic and tough (ahem! It is calculus after all), but it is presented in a manner like never before. Fully animated, with beautiful graphics. I must say, that’s the closest I have seen art and math to be, not compromising with either. It just bridged the left and right brain hemispheres.

Signature Track + Proctored Exam – “That shiny Verified Certificate”

Signature Track and the credit recommendation exam is the next big step in online education.

I convinced my parents to give it a try. That also on a course whose forums clearly suggested that the course requires serious dedication. The signature track registration process was very smooth and clear, no problems with that whatsoever. The Signature Track does not make any change in the course material, except now you have to take a picture of yourself every time you submit a home work and also type in a sentence that checks your typing pattern, hence confirming your identity. Also I must say that there is something magical about the Signature Track, that makes you do the course work more seriously!

Even more fun lies in taking the proctored Credit Recommendation Exam. It was not a compulsion for me as I had already enrolled for the Advanced Placement exam for Calculus BC, but what an amazing experience it was. The proctor was kind enough to clear my childish doubts like “Can I have cookies while taking the test?” I was asked two photo IDs and I had to pan the camera around my room before getting started. We also lost connection in between, thankfully it was restored in a fraction of a second. The Proctor then checked my browsing history and reestablished our connection (with remote control of my PC), before I could continue. After that exam, I was so excited that I was one of the very few who get to try this in the first slot!

Within a few days, a glittering certificate, verified by the University of Pennsylvania and Coursera arrived in my inbox, and I have placed it (electronically) near my ITMT statement of accomplishment from Stanford, what a rare sight that is! Especially for a young Indian, belonging to a middle class family, who has not even completed his high school. Only Coursera can make that happen!

I can recommend the Signature Track for:
1. Resume Enhancement
2. Motivation to complete the course with all seriousness

Why I think I absorbed more knowledge than a normal classroom setting?

Simple answer – Mastery Based Self-Paced Learning! If I face trouble with sequence operators after watching the lecture, I can give time to sequence operators without worrying that I won’t be able to catch up with the class. Still I don’t understand, try the Practice Problems. Still confused? Rush to the discussion forums. In Calculus:Single Variable there were many brilliant students. Most of them had completed their education and were very willing to help! Plus the staff was very proactive in solving our doubts and keeping us motivated.

If MOOCs didn’t existed, I would have never ever got a chance to interact with great professors like Dr. Ghrist and Dr. Devlin.

Future Plans – “Inspiring others!”

I have recommended Coursera to many of my friends, they love it. I have also shown Coursera to many elder people, who have left education many many years ago. Their thanks especially means a lot to me. Because of Coursera, the idea of lifelong education seems suddenly possible. I also believe that education should be accessible to everyone.

I do plan to apply to universities in the US, but it is a little too early to talk about that!

Due to the influence of the online learning sites, I was motivated to share whatever knowledge I had online. Hence, I personally started making a few small videos.

I have also assembled a group of kids here (roughly same age) and we make educational videos. We are working hard here and after we have a few chapters in Math done + with the help of already available videos, we plan to try out some “flipped classroom” experiments back here in India. These could even one day help solve the problem of a primary-level teacher shortage in India.

I admit that I am young and inexperienced, but I feel that this is how education must be! I have never *enjoyed* it so much!

Calculus: Single Variable is beginning again on May 24th! You can join Signautre Track to earn a Verified Certificate and take the Credit Recommendation Exam at the end of the course to earn an ACE CREDIT college credit recommendation. Learn more with the College Credit Recommendation Guidebook.

Collaborating with Publishers to Bring Courserians More Affordable, Accessible Educational Resources

helloyinner — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:03:00 -0400

Since Coursera launched, we’ve been determined to bring students affordable and accessible course materials.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re taking the next big step toward that mission by working with many of the top higher education publishers. This collaboration will expand the availability of the publishers’ high-quality content and resources, facilitated by Chegg, a hub where students can access tools and materials.

Starting today, publishers Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education,Oxford University Press SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering versions of their e-textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s DRM-protected e-Reader, to Coursera students. We are also actively discussing pilot agreements and related alliances with Springer and other publishers.

“We recognize the importance of forging partnerships with other stakeholders in the education space in order to help students overcome barriers and evolve the way they access education,” says Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera. “By collaborating with publishers, we are able to provide access to some of the world’s best resources to Coursera students, supporting our goal of learning without limits.”

While professors teaching courses on our platform have always been able to assign high-quality content freely available on the Web, they will now also be able to work with these publishers to provide an even wider variety of teaching and learning materials.

How it works

For participating courses, students will be able to access either chapters or the entire book, for free for the duration of the course through the Chegg e-Reader. They can use this reading to deepen their knowledge. Students will also be able to purchase full versions of e-textbooks provided by publishers for continued personal learning.

When will these book be available?

What will be the first courses offering e-textbooks through these collaborations? After May 20th students in participating courses will be able to access the textbook from within the course. The first courses that will use the integrated Chegg e-Reader are:

• Writing II: Rhetorical Composing, Susan Delagrange, Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Kay Halasek, Ben McCorkle and Cynthia Selfe, The Ohio State University
• Introductory to Physics I with Laboratory, Michael Schatz, GaTech

Do we need to download the e-Reader software?

No, Chegg’s e-Reader with the assigned e-textbook will be available through your browser.

Will professors continue to use other materials or are course materials exclusively being provided by these publishers now?

Professors will continue to be able to use course materials other than the content provided by these publishers.

How long will the content be available?

The publisher content will be free and available for enrolled students for the duration of the class. If you wish to use the e-textbook before or after the course, they will be available for purchase.

Coursera is committed to making a great education accessible to anyone. We are proud to be taking this important step in that direction.

On The Topic of Boredom

helloyinner — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:03:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: Pamela Fox is Coursera’s Lead Student Team Engineer.

A few weeks ago, my colleague Julia Stiglitz and I gave a talk at the GSummit conference about motivation and accomplishment in the online classroom. We looked at the problems that students face, and what we can do to make it better for them.

One problem - that anyone who’s ever been a student or teacher in any setting probably knows - is that of boredom. When I was a student in grade school and got bored, I’d daydream or doodle and wait until something exciting happened or class ended. Now, if I’m a student in an online classroom and get bored, I simply “walk with my fingers” over to my next browser tab, and start browsing Reddit or Facebook or any one of those websites that I really should block forever. Eventually I realize I completely missed the lecture and have to re-watch it later, if that ever happens.

The topic of boredom is present in classrooms, regardless of whether it is in person or online because it’s easy for our attention to wander.

What is boredom, anyway?

Before diving into the ways that we can try to reduce boredom, I want to answer a more fundamental question: “What is boredom?” As I discovered, many researchers have tried to answer that same question.

According to C. Merrifield, “Boredom can be described as a negative affective state associated with increased arousal (i.e., increasing HR; higher cortisol levels), and decreased attention (lower SCL)”. Basically, it’s not a low-energy state with high apathy, like many presume - it’s a high energy state with low attention.

One group of researchers went as far as to figure out the steps needed to induce boredom:

Induce sensory deprivation by reducing external stimuli to a minimum

Create monotony, by using highly predictive repetitive stimuli

Prevent drowsiness by using stimuli with high intensity.

Do not satisfy the need for excitement; rather use the user’s expectation to create an anti-climax.

Avoid any novelties, changes and surprises; everything should seem in place and make sense.

Do not mentioning a wait on forehand, nor explaining the length and reason of it.

Emphasize the passage of time during a wait.

…And they found that it took less than 10 minutes, on average.

Now, what do those steps remind you of in the classroom? A teacher giving a lecture, of course. In his book “Brain Rules,” John Medina asked students to report their attention levels in the classroom and documented a similar effect of that 10 minute time mark, as well.

Reducing boredom in MOOCs

So, what can we do about this? Well, to start with, we can address the problem of duration. Most classroom lectures are an hour long, but we encourage our instructors to break their lectures into smaller chunks, from 3-15 minutes long.

Plus, we give students the speed up button on browsers that support it, so a 15 minute lecture could actually be a 10 minute lecture (if you’re going at 1.5, my favorite speed).

Many instructors also inject little quizzes and surveys throughout their lectures, which puts you in a more active mode for a few seconds and break up the monotony of the lecture format.

Different lecture formats

Besides what we do across the whole platform, we also have many instructors experimenting with their own approaches to making lectures more exciting. Here are a few of my favorite examples of that, but I bet you have some of your own (tell us in the comments!):

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry
Instead of the traditional single-lecturer-talking format, Professor Al Fireis turned his lectures into Socratic-style roundtables with his TAs, where they’d discuss a poem and invite poets to read theirs aloud. They also did similar style Google+ Hangouts, where they’d include actual Coursera students in the virtual roundtable as well.
Calculus Single Variable
When I think Calculus, I think “ugh, calculus!” You too? Professor Robert Ghrist wanted to make his students think differently about calculus, so he hand-drew visualizations of all the calculus concepts and turned those into his lectures. Ghrist told me “the theory is that by using color, animation, and the non-threatening framing of a comic book, we can keep people from getting too bored or too intimidated.” Or as a student told him, “You’re one of the few who make math fun!” You can check out the lectures here.
Interactive Programming with Python
A handful of professors from Rice taught this class, and they made it more fun by co-teaching lectures, by playing games with eachother in the lectures (the same games we were asked to program), and by poking fun at eachother in the lectures where they taught alone. They were clearly enjoying teaching the class, and that made me enjoy it too.

That’s what I love about working for Coursera - we can experiment with different ways of delivering online education, we can learn from instructors doing their own experimenting, and we can learn from those experiments to keep improving it.

Now, I better finish this blog post before you get bored. :-)

The Anatomy of a Verified Certificate & Shareable Course Records

helloyinner — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:32:00 -0400

Many Courserians have been asking about how Verified Certificates and shareable course records work. We hope this helps!

Verified Certificates

1: Recognition from a world renowned institution

Verified Certificates are a currency for your lifelong learning achievements. With Verified Certificates, you receive official recognition from world renowned institution for successfully completing a course on Coursera.

A Verified Certificates can enhance anyone’s lifelong education. You can use them to: • Build your qualifications and prove yourself in something new • List on your resume or CV and along with applications • Share your accomplishment with colleagues and friends on your personal page or social media pages • Reward yourself for your commitment to your course

Remember that a Verified Certificate does not include credit towards a degree, nor does it make you a student at the respective university. It does however prove you’ve mastered the material in your rigorous and thorough course.

2: Verify URL: Your verifiable accomplishment

The Verified Certificate has plenty of nifty features that help you share your accomplishment, like the Verify URL. Anyone you share your certificate with can validate its authenticity directly on Coursera by visitintg this URL “coursera.org/verify/your_verification_code” in the lower right-hand corner of your Verified Certificate.

When someone’s visits this URL, the page will confirm the authenticity of your Certificate and share more about the course’s syllabus and workload.

See a Verify URL for our Engineer Jacob’s recently completely Duke course!

Shareable Course Records

You can share your complete course performance with anyone you choose. To access this page, login and go to your name in the upper right hand corner of your Coursera page. Find “Course Records” and click on it.

Like the Verify URL, this page is reachable via a URL unique to you. However, unlike the Verify URL, this page also displays your final course score. Anyone you share your Course Records URL with can visit this page to see summary of the course format and assignments and your detailed performance. It is easy to control who can access this url and you can reset it anytime too!

We encourage you to share your Verify Certificate URL and Course Records Page.

How can I earn a Verified Certificate?

You can earn a Verified Certificate by joining Signature Track for an eligible course. Signature Track securely links your work to your real identity using your photo and unique typing pattern.

Eligible courses starting this week include Introduction to Operations Management and Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society, both from University of Pennsylvania, and Citizenship and U.S. Immigration from Emory University. You can always see a full list in our course catalog!

See 25+ SigTrack Courses

Coursera Announces Professional Development Courses to Facilitate Lifelong Learning for Teachers

helloyinner — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:08:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: Julia Stiglitz is the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development at Coursera.

Nine years ago, I walked as a new teacher into my 4th grade classroom in East San Jose and began my career in education. I owe much of my success during that first year (which was even more intense than the first year of a startup!) to Sean, my coach and mentor, who guided my professional development and gave me the crucial feedback that I needed.

Today we are extremely pleased to announce the launch of a teacher professional development category on Coursera. We believe that helping teachers improve their skills is an important contribution that we can make to the education of students everywhere. We are truly excited about the possibilities that having these courses available for free online, to be used independently or in a blended learning capacity, will open up for teachers, schools, and districts.

Seven leading schools of education have joined this initiative, including the College of Education, University of Washington; Curry School of Education, University of Virginia; Johns Hopkins University School of Education; Match Education’s Sposato Graduate School of Education; Peabody College of Education and Human Development, Vanderbilt University; Relay Graduate School of Education; and University of California, Irvine Extension.

Additionally, we welcome a new network of educational institutions and museums, including the American Museum of Natural History; The Commonwealth Education Trust; Exploratorium; The Museum of Modern Art; and New Teacher Center.

There are too many courses that I am genuinely excited about to list in this post. Here’s just a taste of them:

• “Common Core in Action: Literacy Across Content Areas,” from the New Teacher Center

• “Teaching Character and Creating Positive Classroom,” from Relay Graduate School of Education taught by Dave Levin, the co-founder of KIPP

• “The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model for 21st Century Schools” taught by Mariale Hardiman of John Hopkins School of Education

• “Effective Classroom Interactions: Supporting Young Children’s Development,” from UVA, taught by Bridget Hamre, Grace Funk, Allison Leach and Kathy Neesen

• “Tinkering Fundamentals: Integrating Making Activities into Your STEM Classroom,” from the Exploratorium

• “Student Thinking at the Core,” taught by Barbara Stengel and Marcy Singer-Gabella of Vanderbilt University

• “Coaching Teachers: Promoting Changes that Stick,” taught by Orin Gutlerner of Match Education

• Three science content focused courses for Educators taught by the American Museum of Natural History

• Eight part series on the Foundations of Teaching for Learning aimed at teachers in the developing world taught by Commonwealth Education Trust

We understand that primary and secondary teachers face many challenges. It is with a great deal of optimism and humility that we are partnering with this exceptional and diverse group of institutions to support teachers’ professional learning and development. Below is an introduction video for one of our new courses:

See all Teacher PD Courses!

Make Work, School or Life more streamlined with the Introduction to Operations Course!

helloyinner — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 04:53:00 -0400

With MOOC platforms, students in the (virtual) global classroom are not just learners, but doers. The time between learning a new concept in the course and trying it out in practice has shrunk from weeks, months, or years to days. Last week, we told you about a Design Course which prompted students to apply their design skills to create something to improve their lives; today, we want to tell you about another Coursera Course which has taken this concept to practice: “An Introduction to Operations Management”, offered by Christian Terwiesch of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

The course will go live for the second time on Monday (4/29/2013). In the first offering, the course attracted some 87,000 students, the strong contingent of them being active as business professionals and university students. They applied the knowledge from the course to operations related tasks at work, school and home.

To capture that “From Knowledge to Action” component of the course further, Christian and his team created the first ever Operations Challenge. They invited students to submit implementation reports of what they had changed in their work in response to the new knowledge they gained. The presentations were peer reviewed using the Coursera platform, resulting in over 2,000 awesome presentations of “how to improve your operations” and enormous amounts of feedback from the community to the submitting students. To build on this success, the new launch of “An Introduction to Operations Project” now features an official learning project called the Coursera Operations Project. Students will be working on 5 assignments that together create a process improvement project. Each milestone has a specific assignment. Students submit and get feedback from other students on how they apply the content.

Below are examples of previous students’ projects from the first Operations Challenge.

We hope this will illustrate ways you can apply the operations knowledge from this course to your work, school, home or life. Not only does this force students to try out what they learn, it also creates an enormous reservoir of implementation reports across industries and across the world. This way, the community curates a library of case studies, free and open to everyone. Look forward to seeing you in class!

Enroll in Intro to Operations!

3 Tips from Jonathan Haber on Coursera Time Management!

helloyinner — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:31:00 -0400

Editor’s note: Jonathan Haber is a Courserian who is taking classes for 12 months on Coursera to experiment with a project of his called “Degree of Freedom”. He is guest blogging on our site throughout this next year to keep us up-to-date on his progress!

Good morning Coursera-land!

A few weeks back, I ran a series on MOOCs and time over at my Degree of Freedom site that delved into subjects like how to schedule classes and set priorities in an online learning world where schedules are so flexible.

Because the flexibility of anywhere, anytime learning comes at a price. For if it’s easy to schedule this week’s lectures and assignments on any day of the week, it’s just as easy to let them slip into next week. And do that enough times and pretty soon the workload needed to complete a course becomes so daunting that it becomes easier just to drop the class.

One of the key reasons I’ve heard that people dropped a MOOC course they had every intention of completing was that they failed to understand the time commitment these courses required, and/or let their schedule get away from them.

I put together a brief video that includes suggestions for how to manage time-related issues regarding MOOCs (or any online learning experience):

If you’re interested, I elaborate further on these suggestions here.

Whoops! The alarm just went off. Time to get back to class.

All for now.

-Jonathan

First Real Life and Virtual Coursera Ideahack Meetup on Gamification on April 26th!

helloyinner — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:05:00 -0400

Hello friends! On April 26, the Digital October Center in Moscow will host a first-ever interactive, ideahack meetup for participants of the Coursera Gamification course with Professor Kevin Werbach, which will simultaneously happen in person and online! Here is more information:

WHO: Up to 200 Students from Moscow (in-person) and up to 45 students from all over the world (virtual).

WHAT: A 2-hour Gamification Problem Solving Meetup called Ideahack! Together with virtual and face-to-face students, small groups of ~10 will create solutions for sustainability issues by applying gamification principles.

WHEN: On April 26, from 11am - 1pm (US Eastern Time) and 7 pm - 9pm (Moscow Time) in-person and online (link will be sent to those who successfully register).

LANGUAGES: The meetup is bilingual (English + Russian); simultaneous translation provided.

SPECIAL BONUS: Kevin Werbach, from University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business, will personally review the results of the teams’ work.

PRIZES: Winning team will receive Cut the Rope from ZeptoLabs and Digital October, as well as official Coursera shirts signed by the Coursera team, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller.

HOW TO REGISTER:

• If you are in Moscow and want to participate live, click here!

• If you are in another part of the world and wish to join virtually (first come first serve), click here! - please note there is a limit of 45 people.

• You also have the option to watch the online streaming of this meetup here

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Some background: In the beginning of April, the Digital October Center and the educational platform Coursera announced that they will be piloting to translate video lectures into Russian. In this vein, subtitles for Kevin Werbach’s course are already available in the Gamification course. Digital October is creating these series of Coursera Moscow Meetups at their headquarters to compliment this effort!

Congrats to the First Students to Earn Verified Certificates with Signature Track & A Chat with The Coursera Team!

helloyinner — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 02:49:00 -0400

We’d like to offer a big congratulations to the first group of Courserians to earn a Verified Certificate! We recently awarded more than 700 Verified Certificate for students in Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention from UCSF and over 200 for each of the following courses: Introduction to Genetics and Evolution from Duke University and Microeconomics Principles from University of Illinois. Other courses with students recently earning Verified Certificates include Calculus: Single Variable from University of Pennsylvania, Algebra and Precalculus from UCI and Bioelectricity from Duke University. Congratulations from all of us to you!

[Jacob Lyles and Leith Abdulla with their Verified Certificates, beaming!]

Since launching Signature Track, we’ve received lots of questions from Courserians around the world. In the following Q&A, our Certificates team shares some insights about the program and students who participated— and hopefully answers some of your questions about Verified Certificates.

[Coursera’s Certificates Team, saying hello!]

What is a Verified Certificate?

Coursera Verified Certificates are a currency for your lifelong learning achievements. With a Verified Certificate, you receive official recognition from a world renowned university after successfully completing a course on Coursera through Signature Track.

How are Courserians using their Verified Certificates?

You can use a Verified Certificate to build your qualifications in something new or advance in your current field. Many students list their accomplishment on their resumes/CVs and include them along with applications. Other students proudly display them to friends and family. Some students even use them as extra motivation to complete their courses! Verified Certificates are a great way to continually improve your education and career outside of school. In fact, more than 70% of students who joined the Signature Track had a college degree!

What are examples of real people using their Verified Certificates to improve their education or career?

In Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention from UCSF, we heard from:

• A professional chef, who added a better understanding of nutrition principles to their career

• A running coach and nutrition counselor building their qualifications to attract new clients

• A competitive athlete and molecular biologist incorporating nutrition into their new career as an athletic coach

• A physical therapist who was frequently questioned about nutrition and can now complement their therapy with advice about diet

How can I earn a Verified Certificate?

You can earn a Verified Certificate by joining Signature Track for an eligible course, and then successfully completing your course. Signature Track securely links your work to your real identity using your photo and unique typing pattern. The chance to join Signature Track is available in the first 2 or 3 weeks of an eligible course.

Nearly 30 courses (spanning many subjects) are currently offering Signature Track and Verified Certificates. Courses that recently started include Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society from University of Pennsylvania and Introduction to Interactive programming in Python from Rice University among others. You can always see a full list in our course catalog.

Are there any other interesting statistics about students who get Verified Certificates?

Yes, here are some facts:

• Signature Track can help motivate you to complete your course: Students in the Signature Track had some of the highest completion rates, even higher than other groups who also indicated a strong commitment to complete the course. In total, almost 70% of the students who joined the Signature Track went on to successfully complete their course.

• If you join the Signature Track and aren’t able to finish your course, you will get a coupon to try again for free in a future session of the same course. Groovy.

• 9,000+ students from all around the world have joined the Signature Track for their course.

• English Composition I from Duke University has more than 500 students in the Signature Track, as does Model Thinking from University of Michigan. Over 2,000 students are taking Gamification from University of Pennsylvania with Signature Track.

• Students from more than 80 countries have already earned Verified Certificates through Signature Track. Some of the most popular countries include the US, Spain, Brazil, Greece, Canada, India, Ghana and the UK.

What if I want a Verified Certificate through Signature Track but I don’t have the financial means?

At Coursera, we believe that education is a basic human right. To that end, we offer the Coursera Financial Aid program to open up access to education regardless of economic circumstances. We have awarded financial aid packages to students around the world so that they can participate in Signature Track. Here’s a snapshot of these students:

• An aspiring young software engineer from Nigeria taking Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python.

• A Bangladeshi professional studying Global Sustainable Energy with a vision to improve access to electricity in his country.

• A young Indian student taking Synapses, Neurons and Brains to prepare for entrance exams and his application for a PhD program in clinical neuroscience.

We hope you’ve learned some useful facts about Verified Certificates and Signature Track. We are excited to continue to offer this option for more courses over the coming months.

See Signature Track Courses

Design and Create an Invention that Improves Your Life!

helloyinner — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:05:00 -0400

University of Pennsylvania’s popular Design Course was a huge hit when it was offered the first time, as it was popular with students who wanted to become designers or just learn about how to effectively design and create things from scratch. Many students in the course created every-day inventions that helped improve their lives, ranging from an automatically adjustable ice tray called “The Ice Slider” to an iPad holder called “Fixo”.

The Course is being offered again and will start on April 29th (Next Monday!). We hope you to see you there! The awesome teaching staff at UPenn helped put together an illustration of select student projects to show you the diversity of cool stuff you can learn to design when you take the course. Check out the presentation below:

Enroll in Design Course!