MOOCs

UMD plans to formally join a program that offers Coursera’s University partner courses for free for use by UMD faculty and students. Most courses that Coursera offers are available through this program. Many universities around the world are leveraging the lectures from Coursera’s partner universities for flipped classes: for example, students may watch the lectures then go to online UMD synchronous classes (e.g., Zoom) to discuss and/or participate in projects.

Since most Coursera courses are offered in both a free and a paid version, faculty may access the free version today to preview and vet the appropriateness of the course assets, such as the pre-recorded lectures.

Steps for accessing a preview of free Coursera content appear below (Note: this will access the free portions of courses, such as the lectures, and not the paid portion. We are currently negotiating with Coursera to also have access to the paid portions of most courses for free and will update our progress via this page. Please note that the paid portions generally include assignments and assessments - likely, these paid elements offered by other universities may not be of as much interest in UMD faculty course delivery.)

Enrolling in a Course on Coursera

1. Create an account at Coursera using your UMD email address and a password.
2. Search for an appropriate course:
   • When signed into your Coursera account, if you wish to match a UMD course catalog offering to the best-matched Coursera offering, use CourseMatch (see the instructions directly below for Accessing CourseMatch)
   • You may also search for desired topics covered in your course using the Coursera website search box
3. When signed into your Coursera account, visit the course's page (from a specialization's page (a multi-course offering), scroll down to choose one course and click) then click the course's Enroll button.
4. On the next screen, click on the prompt to "Audit the course." It typically appears at the bottom of the pop-up box often entitled 7-Day Free Trial (auditing is always free and not limited to 7 days), or appears as an option, "Audit Only" or "Full Course, No Certificate." Because Coursera conducts many split tests, other similar prompts may also appear - look for something similar if none of the above appear word-for-word.

How to CourseMatch

For purposes of faculty vetting appropriate content, Coursera provides CourseMatch, based on UMD’s course catalog. Log into your Coursera account, visit the campus-coursematch page, type Maryland in the search box, indicate College Park (from the pop-up menu), choose a particular course, hit the Run button, and the top 5 Coursera matches to the UMD course return along with a relevance score. Faculty may review the offered courses to find appropriate resources or, for a topical content search, may use Coursera’s website search to locate relevant content (such as recorded lectures).

If you have any questions, please contact moocs@umd.edu.