Yale’s latest round of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will provide learners across the globe instruction on legal concepts, negotiation strategies, and the details of 2008 financial crisis.

These courses are the first Yale has offered on Coursera’s new “on-demand,” cohort-based platform. The platform responds to two requests Coursera received from global learners. Learners wanted course material to be much more accessible, but they also wanted their learning process to retain some structure. The cohort-based platform creates a new course session every three weeks, complete with automatically generated (soft) deadlines and fresh discussion forums. The hope is that this will allow cohort-based courses to maintain the robust student-to-student interaction of a session-based course, while drastically reducing the time a learner has to wait before accessing course material.  

The new slate of courses includes “Introduction to Negotiation” with Barry Nalebuff, the Milton Steinbach Professor of Management at the Yale School of Management; “A Law Student’s Toolkit” with Ian Ayres, the William K. Townsend Professor of Law; and “The Global Financial Crisis” with Andrew Metrick, the Michael H. Jordan Professor of Finance and Management and deputy dean of the Yale School of Management (SOM); and Timothy Geithner, former U.S. treasury secretary and lecturer on management at SOM.

“It’s a public service to the world,” says Ayres of the online courses. “Yale is a great provider of knowledge and the fact that we’re putting ourselves forward online is an excellent way to let people know about our core business of teaching.”

Yale’s free MOOCs attract tens of thousands of visitors globally each year, providing access to educational materials that some may not otherwise receive due to geography, age, or opportunity.

Read the full article by Michael Cummings of Yale News at: http://news.yale.edu/2015/11/06/free-online-learning-yale-experts-now-of…