When the University of Illinois agreed to offer free e-courses through video lecture company Coursera a few weeks ago, it was hard to expect what came next. In the first 24 hours, 14,000 people enrolled in the downstate college’s courses. That was Tuesday, July 17. Now, a little over a week later, the number of enrolled students has crossed 33,000, according to Bill Bell, Executive Director for Marketing and Communications at the College of Engineering.
He’s keeping a watch on that number because Heterogeneous Parallel Programming (six weeks) was one of the most popular classes, second only to Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps (TBD). If this doesn’t speak to how badly people are trying to attain technological and digital skills, I don’t know what does.
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Wen-mei Hwu, the electrical and computer engineering professor teaching parallel programming, attributes the attractiveness of his course to the rise of heterogeneous parallel systems in computing, as well as the lack of training programmers have in those systems. “We estimate that there should be millions of programmers worldwide who would like to understand the principles and practical skills of programming heterogeneous parallel systems,” he said.
We asked Lawrence Angrave, who will teach the app development class, how the popularity of house course speaks to the kind of skills that are valuable in today’s market. His response?
“Today's students see just how pervasive computer science is in our society...and they want to be part of this revolution. The world needs more top computer scientists! Every year we have employers banging at the doors to be part of our job fair. My students tell me about their exciting internships and their amazing team projects. These skills are not merely acquired by passive learning though—our students work really hard and play hard not just at their computer science coursework but with their own open-ended project ideas. They know they are heading for bright futures and expect to change the world and rise to top technical and management positions in global companies or start their own companies or both.”
U. of I. was one of Coursera’s 12 new university partners announced on the 17th. It was the only school in the state on the partner list and was only approached the week before course offerings went live. It was also among the most popular universities based on initial sign-ups: The Chicago Tribune reports about 50,000 enrollees in that first day.
Free to anyone with an Internet connection and a structure built to result efficient and effective learning, Coursera has already had over 1.5 million enrollments in 43 countries since its founding last fall. With a strong course list, U. of I. is adding to that number at a neck breaking pace.
