Wave of free online dev courses emerge on Coursera

A number of free development and programming related courses have emerged on a new US-based online university scheme.

Named Coursera, the website enables students to watch lectures, take part in interactive exercises and study in their own time on courses submitted by a total of 30 universities such as Stanford, Brown and Illinois.

A number of other new universities bringing courses to the site were also announced yesterday, including US-based Florida and Vanderbilt, the University of British Columbia in Canada, the University of London and the University of Science and Technology, based in Hong Kong.

New courses making their way onto the website include Computer Science 101, which tasks students with a number of small coding experiments for aspiring developers with no prior experience.

Other courses include Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Algorithms, An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps, Online Games: Literature, New Media and Narrative and Heterogeneous Parallel Programming, which teaches the use of CUDE/OpenCL, OpenACC and MPI.

“We set out to make education accessible to everyone around the world, and seeing our vision come to life has been an incredible experience,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller.

"With the addition of the exceptional, forward-thinking institutions coming on board today, we’re proud to offer an even more diverse experience to our students."

195 courses are currently available on the website, with more than 1.3million students taking part.

Visit the official website for more information.