Feed Your Mind with Coursera – Free Online College Courses

Coursera is a social entrepreneurship company which partners with many world-class top universities to offer courses online for anyone to take – for free!  The Coursera crew envisions a future where the top universities are not only educating thousands of students, but millions.  The technology developed by Coursera enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students online.

The ultimate goal is to give everyone access to a world-class education that has so far only been available to a select few. Knowledge is power.  Coursera strives to empower people with education that will improve their lives, their family’s life, and the communities they live in.

Courses offered by Coursera are constructed in way that helps students easily master the material.  By taking one of their classes,students can watch lectures taught by top-notch professors, can learn at their own pace, test their knowledge gained and reinforce the concepts through engaging, interactive exercises.  By joining one of the Coursera classes, you are joining a global community of thousands of students learning alongside you.

Courses are based on solid pedagogical foundations which allow students to master new concepts quickly and effectively.  Key ideas include mastery learning to ensure that students have multiple attempts to demonstrate newly gained knowledge.  The program uses interactivity to ensure student engagement and to assist with long-term retention.  Frequent feedback is provided so that individuals can monitor their individual progress and know when they’ve really mastered the material.

From Medicine, the Humanities, Biology, Social Sciences, Business, Mathematics, Computer Science and many others, students can improve their resume, advance their career, or just learn more and expand their own knowledge. The ideal is that multiple courses will be of interest and students will continue with their Coursera learning by studying many different subjects.

Here are a few of the courses currently offered:

Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics, University of Washington

Computing for Data Analysis, Johns Hopkins University

Introduction to Genetics and Evolution, Duke University

Building an Information Risk Management Toolkit, University of Washington

Calculus One, Ohio State University

Participating Schools include:

Berklee College of Music, Brown University, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Duke University Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Ohio State University, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, and University of California at Irvine.