Udemy, an online course hosting service that I’ve previously written about, recently launched a new project called The Faculty Project. The Faculty Project is a series of free online courses developed by professors from top-notch universities including Northwestern, Dartmouth, and Vassar. The courses will be conducted through Udemy’s platform of video, slides, and PDFs. While it’s not clear if the professors will or will not be checking-in on the courses, there are discussion boards for students in each course to correspond with each other.

The current course offerings are:
Modern China
The Economics of Energy and the Environment
Ancient Greek Religion
Perspectives on Contemporary American Democracy
Foundations of Business Strategy
The United States Constitution
Operations Management
Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness
A History of Water and Humans
Foundations of Public Health

Applications for Education
One of the things that I love about the growth of open, online courses is that high school students with an interest in a topic that isn’t taught in their schools, can pursue and investigate that interest on their own while getting a little sense of materials they might encounter in college.