The U. of I. is expanding its pioneering two-year partnership with online course content provider Coursera, announcing Oct. 15 a new cohort of classes and a unique approach for delivering them.
Deanna Raineri
The university’s next group of massive open online courses will be delivered as “specializations” – clusters of related courses culminating with a unifying capstone class or project and the opportunity to earn a credential.
The university’s free Coursera classes previously have been delivered as stand-alone classes and the demand has been unprecedented. A course in programming Android mobile apps, for example, enrolled more than 160,000 learners and resulted in the creation of 10,000 mobile apps.
The new specialization approach, developed with the input of Coursera users, divides academic topics into shorter but related instructional modules. For example, the cloud-computing specialization will include five courses in distributed systems, cloud apps and networking; the data-mining specialization will include six courses in data mining, text mining and data visualization. Both specializations will require a capstone project. The other new specializations are business operational excellence and digital
marketing.
The specialization courses, created through collaborations with the College of Engineering, the College of Business and the College of Media, remain free, but earning a credential bearing the Coursera and U. of I. names will require a $49 fee per course.
Deanna Raineri, an associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and special adviser to the provost for online learning, said the content of the specializations will be offered exclusively on the Coursera platform and will be developed by a group of U. of I. professors who are considered experts in their field.
“Offering these high-demand specializations in partnership with Coursera is an unprecedented opportunity for the university,” she said. “It not only puts us on the map, it establishes us as leaders in these emerging areas.”
Rob A. Rutenbar
Rob A. Rutenbar, the head of the Illinois department of computer science, said the university’s involvement with MOOCs is an important outreach tool that meets the university’s land-grant mission of public outreach.
“These courses will build skills that are desperately needed,” he said. “They will teach crucial topics in a new format; they will more than double the number of MOOCs being offered by Illinois; and they will provide this information to an unprecedented number of students.”
In addition to allowing the university to promote its academic strengths to a global audience, the new specializations could create a welcomed revenue stream. Raineri said specializations have boosted online enrollments and revenue for MOOCs already offered in this format by other institutions.
“Money is not the reason we entered into this partnership with Coursera, but we hope to generate some revenue to sustain and expand these outreach efforts,” she said.
She said the U. of I. has benefited from its partnership with Coursera in many ways.
One way is that content developed for the online classes is serving “double-duty” by being used to enhance face-to-face classroom and traditional online instruction. Another is that the online student-use information being culled by campus researchers is being used to develop improved methods for delivering academic content and engaging learners.
“It is a lot of work, but our partnership with Coursera is benefiting the campus in many ways,” she said.
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