The University of Colorado is entering the world of MOOCs — Massive Open Online Courses — as part of an agreement with Coursera, one of the nation’s leading for-profit providers in the rapidly growing field, The Denver Post reports. CU is one of 10 state university systems that joined forces with Coursera on Thursday. Others include the State University of New York, the University of Tennessee Systems, the University of Kentucky, the University of Nebraska and the University of New Mexico. “With this new agreement, CU is positioned at the leading edge of exploring how this quickly developing platform can help us deliver better education opportunities to more students,” CU President Bruce Benson said in a statement. Started about five years ago, MOOCs were popularized by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, whose online class on Artificial Intelligence attracted about 160,000 students. Encouraged by the results, Thrun launched Udacity, another MOOC provider. Colorado State University’s Global Campus, which is 100 percent online, entered into a contract with Udacity last fall.
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