Melbourne Uni offers free online courses

The University of Melbourne has joined the free online education revolution that is transforming higher education around the world. It has announced that it has partnered with Coursera, a US for-profit company started by two professors at Stanford University, to deliver about 10 online subjects by next year. Coursera officials said the website has reached over 1.3 million students since its first courses went live six months ago. Universities partnering with Coursera include: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of British Columbia, University of London, and a plethora of prestigious institutions in the US including Brown, Columbia, and Berklee College of Music. University of Melbourne provost Professor Margaret Sheil said the university was delighted to join Coursera and other leading universities in offering courses to a new audience who otherwise may not have had the chance to engage with the university. “We are pleased to be the first Australian university to partner with Coursera to offer free online subjects to anyone, anywhere in the word, with a computer and internet access,” she said. Sheil said the initial set of subject offerings through Coursera will be diverse, including macroeconomics, discrete optimisation, animal behaviour and epigenetics. The e-learning platform makes extensive use of short video lectures, interactive content and a global community of peers. In response to the notion of online education some say the expansion of massive open online courses (MOOCs) will take over traditional university life and that institutions need to reinvent their role to retain a physical presence. At a recent conference in Melbourne on high-speed broadband and higher education Australian National University vice-chancellor Professor Ian Young said that conventional facets of campus life are already dwindling. Young told the conference that large lectures would disappear as more students continue to move online. “Why in the world would students come along and … sit in a passive lecture with 300 other students when they can access material online themselves,” he said. Universities that wanted to maintain physical presence would need to focus on offering additional value in their courses. “The campus will more and more become an environment of research rather than teaching,” he said. But despite the rising popularity of MOOCs, graduates of the online courses can only be awarded certificates of completion but cannot gain qualifications. Young said it is unlikely universities such as Stanford or Harvard would offer accredited courses where graduates could earn qualifications at no cost. “Why is a Harvard degree valuable? Because it is rare and unique and a stamp of achievement. If you have hundreds of thousands of students with those degrees you’re effectively devaluing the degree.” Young said that online courses opened another avenue for students to access the top universities because demand for their on-campus courses remained high. The University of Melbourne is now one of 17 universities joining Coursera, bringing the total number of universities partnering with the online course provider to 33.