U. to offer online lectures

Coursera offers free interactive lectures supplemented by short quizzes, assignments and online forums. The company also announced Wednesday that it has formed partnerships with Stanford University, University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania.

Princeton’s announcement follows a March meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community where Associate Dean of the College Clayton Marsh said that the University was evaluating different platforms to publish online content including MITx, Coursera and Udacity.

Other universities, including Yale and MIT, have developed successful free online course websites in the past. The University currently posts stand-alone lectures using ItunesU but does not upload lectures from courses.

“Online technology is affecting higher education in many ways,” Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83 said in an email. “Some institutions are using more online techniques in their own classrooms, some are charging for online material, and some, including Princeton, are offering online material for free.”

The founders of Coursera, Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, said they approached Princeton last fall about using the platform.

“We’re providing technology that makes it easy for them to offer a better course to their local on-campus students ... and also reach a massive online audience,” they said in a co-signed email.

President Shirley Tilghman said that she hoped the partnership would allow faculty members to experiment more and alter classroom instruction.

“I very much hope that as the first members of the faculty gain experience with the Coursera platform, which involves much more than just putting their lectures online, others will be tempted to experiment with this form of pedagogy,” she said in an email.

Professors Jeremy Adelman and Mitchell Duneier, who will have lectures posted on Coursera, said that they considered their use of the online platform an experiment.

“I have been impatient with my teaching for some time, but I just didn’t know how to experiment,” Adelman said. In September, he said he plans to use Coursera as a way to enhance the educational experience for the students in his class, HIS 201: A History of the World since 1300. Posting the course lectures online would free up class time for a variety of “much more interactive sessions,” including a series of what he called “global dialogues,” opportunities to discuss class topics with experts from around the world over video-conference.

The “global dialogues,” along with precepts and essay assignments, would be exclusive to Princeton students. The recorded lectures, however, would accessible to the public.

“Obviously my core commitment is to my students right here — that’s unflinching,” he said.

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Duneier, who will be teaching SOC 101: Introduction to Sociology using Coursera during the summer, has taken a slightly different approach to the online platform. While Adelman hopes his Coursera lectures will complement his own Princeton class, Duneier’s lectures will offer a self-contained course to the public.

“[The Coursera course] is going to be a class that will have some overlap with the Princeton class,” he said. “But it is meant to be its own thing; it is not meant to be the exact same Princeton class.”

While there are still details to be figured out, Duneier said that Coursera allows him the chance to gather a variety of perspectives from around the world through the site’s global reach, which he said was valuable as a sociology professor.

Though Tilghman noted there are incentives to make aspects of a Princeton education freely available, she said learning through Coursera would never be equivalent to taking a course on campus.

“The opportunity to engage in dialogue with classmates, faculty and teaching assistants will still be the most important aspect of a Princeton education,” she said.