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"In 2014, Yale first launched Massive Open
Online Courses on Coursera, an education platform that partners with
the nation’s top universities to offer online classes for anyone in the
world to take. Now, one year later, Yale has begun to offer its first
“on-demand” MOOCs — courses which have rolling registration so students
can join in at any time." according to Alice Zhou, contributing reporter.
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| Professor Ian Ayres, whose "A Law Student's Toolkit" is one of the Yale MOOC courses on Coursera's "on demand" cohort-based platform, says the MOOCs are "a public service to the world" and "an excellent way to let people know about our core business of teaching." |
Coursera developed on-demand MOOCs in
recent months to address issues of accessibility among its users. Lucas
Swineford, Yale’s executive director of digital dissemination and online
education, said Coursera had previously operated on a session-based
model, where students who wanted to take Yale MOOCs but who had missed
the registration deadlines would often have to wait until the classes
finished to re-enroll for the next cycle. In addition to the new
on-demand MOOCs, Swineford highlighted Coursera’s new “auto-cohort”
feature offered for on-demand classes. This allows Coursera to register a
new group of students about every three weeks so students can enjoy the
freedom on-demand offers but also retain a classroom feel. This year’s
Yale on-demand courses include “Introduction to Negotiation” by School
of Management professor Barry Nalebuff, “A Law Student’s Toolkit” by
Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres ’81 LAW ’86 and “The Global
Financial Crisis” by SOM professor Andrew Metrick ’89 GRD ’89 and
Timothy Geithner, former secretary of the U.S. Department of the
Treasury.
“Our main goal is to amplify the impact
of Yale’s great teachers,” Swineford said. “We want to extend the reach
of some of this incredible educational material from the best Yale
faculty members.”
Although Ayres, Nalebuff and Metrick have
never taught online courses before, all three said they felt optimistic
about what their on-demand MOOCs could achieve.
Ayres stressed the flexibility that
on-demand MOOCs offer students. His course, which lasts just three
weeks, aims to give a brief introduction to the terminology and concepts
lawyers and legal academics use to craft their arguments. He said his
on-demand class especially benefits students who are only interested in
some of the topics he covers. Since students can enroll in the course
whenever they want; they do not have to take the entire course to access
a specific set of lectures. Ayres said he has also attempted to make
his lectures more “modular,” meaning students do not have to have viewed
previous lectures to understand current course material...
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| Photo: Richard Levin |
Former University President Richard Levin is the current CEO of Coursera.
Source: Yale Daily News (blog)
