Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Coursera, a provider of free online courses, announced 17 new college partners yesterday, nearly doubling the number that have agreed to use the company’s platform to offer MOOC’s, or massive open online courses.

The new partners come in a mix of shapes and sizes, comprising state flagships like the University of Maryland at College Park, liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan University, specialized institutions including the Berklee College of Music, and foreign institutions like the University of Melbourne, in Australia. The speed at which colleges are joining is remarkable: The company began operations only in January.

Most partners will offer only a handful of free courses each to start out; Coursera officials recommend that each partner offer five at first. The colleges consider the efforts an experiment, with plans to review them in the near future and decide whether they want to continue to offer the free courses. The agreement between each institution and Coursera is nonexclusive, so the colleges are free to work with other MOOC providers as well.  A list of the new college partners appears below.

Tony

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Berklee College of Music
Brown University
Columbia University
Emory University
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Ohio State University
University of British Columbia
University of California at Irvine
University of Florida
University of London
University of Maryland at College Park
University of Melbourne
University of Pittsburgh
Vanderbilt University
Wesleyan University

Dear Commons Community,

The Mitt Romney campaign has had a bad couple of weeks.  First, there was the rather so-so Republican National Convention with Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair.  This was followed by the Democratic National Convention with Bill Clinton wowing the country.   Then we had Mitt Romney’s less than presidential comments after the Egyptian and Libyan protests during which four Americans were killed in Benghazi. And the latest is Mitt Romney on video dissing 47% of the American people.

The video shows Mitt Romney at a private fund-raiser where he felt free to speak candidly about his campaign and how he would conduct a presidency.  As a New York Times editorial described it:

“In that safe zone, Mr. Romney spoke with a bone-chilling cynicism and a revolting smugness. If he is elected, he said, capital will come back and “we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.” That’s the state of trickle-down economics in the 21st century.

Gone was the pretense that he will be a president of all Americans. Mr. Romney rather neatly divided the country between the people who matter and the 47 percent he does not care about.

To Mr. Romney, that 47 percent consists of people who do not make enough money to be required to pay federal income tax. They are freeloaders, he said, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” It is not his job, he said, as a candidate nor apparently as president if he is elected, “to worry about those people.”

Assuming the Democrats do not shoot themselves in the foot with some outrage of their own, Mitt Romney will have to do incredibly well in the debates in the October to revitalize his sinking campaign.

Tony