Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based provider of massive open online courses, announced a series of deals with state universities to provide MOOC development services.

Under the new deals, Coursera is recasting itself as a platform for credit-bearing courses that would be offered to students enrolled at multiple campuses within a public-university system.

The deals mark a shift for Coursera, which until now has focused on making free, online versions of courses taught by professors at elite colleges.

The company’s new partners are the State University of New York system, the Tennessee Board of Regents and the University of Tennessee systems, the University of Colorado system, the University of Houston system, the University of Kentucky, the University of Nebraska system, the University of New Mexico system, the University System of Georgia, and West Virginia University.

The Chronicle obtained a copy of Coursera’s contract with the University of Kentucky, and the document provides details on how the partnerships might work.

“The document differs substantially from the ones Coursera signed with its early university partners. Those contracts focused on the dynamics of producing and collecting revenue from MOOCs open to the public.

The Kentucky contract deals with additional kinds of collaboration. For example, the document outlines how the university would administer “guided” or “adopted” courses—courses that are developed, either by Kentucky or another Coursera partner, for use by students at the university. It also addresses how the university and the company would go about licensing Kentucky’s Coursera courses to other colleges, and how they would divide revenue generated by any of those courses.”

This has to be considered a major step forward in the MOOC movement.

Tony