The following is taken from the Iversity.org website:
"Who are we?
We are a diverse interdisciplinary team from Berlin. We’ve attended some of the world’s finest institutions. Yet, wherever we went, we were frustrated by the dearth of digital infrastructure in use. That’s why we set out to garner the wealth of opportunities to improve the quality of teaching and learning for future generations of students.Following an EXIST-Founder Scholarship from the German Federal Ministry of Science and Technology, iversity received more than 1 million Euros in funding from the BFB Frühphasenfonds Brandenburg (EU 75% / Brandenburg 25%) and bmp media investors in July 2011. In December of 2012 Marcus Riecke joined the team and invested in the company together with the existing investors, the business angel Masoud Kamali and T-Venture, the venture arm of Deutsche Telekom AG.
Let's take the campus experience online!
The transformative potential of the Internet has yet to be utilized by the very institution that spawned it. As we move further into the digital age, it is becoming clear that the walled-in software solutions universities use today are glaringly outdated.We want to move beyond the existing teaching formats to enable wholly new forms of online teaching and learning. In order to develop open courses we call upon individual instructors, universities and knowledge-based companies to join us in this effort to democratize education.
Our open course platform provides…
We want to develop world-class courses that allow students to learn in an efficient and effective way. However, our aim is not to replace the university or the academics that work there. Our aim is to empower them. We want to allow the best professors to teach thousands of students. On the other hand we want to enable students to take classes from the best professors around the globe. In so doing we want to improve the quality of teaching at existing institutions, without raising the cost of instruction. We believe that open courses can be an important factor in that equation."
- a structured course environment that features multimedia teaching materials;
- assessment features such as multiple choice and peer review in order to keep students engaged and provide them with quantitative and qualitative feedback;
- a discussion board where students can engage in peer-to-peer learning by asking and answering questions or sharing links, references and general observations;
I have recently enrolled in three courses from Iversity.org:
Are you interested in politics? Do you feel the need to have a clearer
understanding of it, beyond the conventional language of media and
social networks? Well, this course might provide the help and the
stimulus you are looking for.
Wild, wild web: Is the Internet a lawless no man’s land? Based on the recent public debate on data protection and massive privacy infringements, this course will explore the connection between cyber security and human rights.
The EU is an economic giant but often perceived as a political dwarf and a military worm. By addressing the greatest challenges to EU external relations, the MOOC explains the law and policy aspects of the EU in global governance.
Other courses include:
Contemporary Architecture
Dark Matter in Galaxies: The Last Mystery
DNA - From Structure to Therapy
Design 101 (or Design Basics)
Monte Carlo Methods in Finance
The DO School Start-Up Lab
The Fascination of Crystals and Symmetry
The Future Of Storytelling
Vehicle Dynamics I: Accelerating and Braking
Vehicle Dynamics II: Cornering
Vehicle Dynamics III: Vertical Oscillations
