Top US universities offer free online courses

Two professors from California want to teach the world for free, MSN reports.

Now, five of the nation's top universities have backed the pair's project, dubbed Coursera, and will next year offer dozens of online courses to students worldwide and at no cost.

Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, creators behind the online learning platform, announced on Wednesday their partnership with Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.

Koller and Ng say Coursera will be different because professors from top schools will teach under their university's name and will adapt their most popular courses for the Web, embedding assignments and exams into video lectures, answering questions from students on online forums - even, perhaps, hosting office hours via videoconference, IOL Scitech writes.

Multiple-choice and short-answer tests will be computer scored. Coursera will soon unveil a system of peer grading to assess more complex work, such as essays or algorithms.

Unlike previous video lectures, which offered a “static” learning model, the Coursera system breaks lectures into segments as short as 10 minutes and offers quick online quizzes as part of each segment, The New York Times says.

Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students' work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants. Koller said this would actually improve the learning experience.