MORGANTOWN, W. Va.– You can become a life-long learner and you don’t even have to go back to school to do it.
Thanks to modern technology, you can take classes online through some of the world’s most prestigious universities. The program is called Coursera. West Virginia University joined the program last week and is now one of 80-plus institutions participating.
West Virginia University Senior Associate Provost Russ Dean says WVU is excited to be part of the program.
“This is kind of a new area but sort of a natural next step for us to generally make this material available to the public at large,” according to Dean.
You don’t have to be enrolled at WVU or any of the other institutions offering the online classes. In fact, you don’t have to be a college grad. All you need is an interest in learning. You can log on to www.coursera.org to find out what classes are offered.
Starting this month, you can take courses like: Introduction to Finance, Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets, Growing Old Around the Globe and Cryptography. There are 39 classes starting up in the next few weeks. Most of them are free and non-credit offerings. They’re categorized as Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs.
Dean says this is unlike any college course you’ve ever taken.
“There can be snippets of lectures. There could be videos of lab demonstrations. There could be any number of kinds of ways of delivering the material that keeps it interesting and keeps it fresh but yet still cutting edge,” stresses the provost.
Currently WVU isn’t offering any MOOCs. But Dean says that will soon change.
“Our faculty is very excited about it. We’ve just begun the conversation about what we might put up,” explains Dean. “We do have a goal of a course or two out there by the spring of 2014.”
West Virginia is the perfect testing ground for the program according to Dean. He says there’s so much to learn and you don’t have to leave your house to reach the rest of the world.
“You have some of the leading experts in the country who are writing the materials. You can be from a very rural area and have access to some of the best information available.”
Dean says the future of Coursera is unlimited as is the learning capacity for those who want to educate themselves.