Duke U joins online teaching push

DUKE University will begin to offer free courses online later this year through the Coursera portal.

One of the first offerings will be a course in behavioural economics taught by Duke's Dan Ariely, whose books include The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.

Coursera began last year in partnership with Stanford, Michigan, Princeton and Pennsylvania universities. Some 650,000 students in 190 countries have taken its courses.

Duke, based in North Carolina, is among a dozen other universities now joining the venture.

Provost Peter Lange, Duke's chief academic officer, said: "Coursera has the potential to substantially influence how we teach our own students on campus as well as to extend the reach of our faculty and show their intellectual strength on a global scale''.



A biologist at Duke, Mohamed Noor, said he planned to offer his on-campus students both the traditional class and the variant he records for Coursera.

"It's an opportunity to change the classroom around and really engage the students,'' he said.

The new institutions signing up with Coursera, founded by Stanford computer science academics Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, are mostly from the US but include the University of Edinburgh and the EPF Lausanne technical university from Switzerland.

Students receive no credit but do can get a certificate signed by the teacher if they complete the course.

-  The Australian