In January this year, the National University of Singapore became the first university here to tie up with United States-based education provider Coursera to offer free online courses to the public.

So far, it is offering up to three courses.

This was followed by Nanyang Technological University in February, which followed suit and launched two courses on Coursera.

Coursera is an education platform that provides free online courses for anyone with an Internet connection to take up and partners top universities and organisations worldwide to do so.

For the NUS courses, the first two which started in January this year were "Unpredictable? Randomness, Chance And Free Will" and "Write Like Mozart: An Introduction To Classical Music Composition".

Each course consists of six to eight weeks of video presentations, exercises, quizzes and peer-to-peer assessment.

There were between 35,000 to 39,000 sign-ups for each course and about 10 to 20 percent completed these first two courses.

On average, completion rates are usually 10 percent or lower for open online courses.

About 35 percent of the students for both courses are from United States, with some 2 percent from Singapore.

Data from the third online course offered, a philosophy module "Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato", is still being collected and the university is considering offering more courses for the public.

In all, some 55,000 people in Singapore have signed up with Coursera, from just 15,000 last year.

Here are the 3 free online courses from NUS you can take from Coursera (Click on the image to go to the Coursera page):

Unpredictable? Randomness, Chance and Free Will

Write Like Mozart: An Introduction to Classical Music Composition

Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato

Here are the 2 free online courses from NTU you can take from Coursera (Click on the image to go to the Coursera page):

Beauty, Form & Function: An Exploration of Symmetry

Introduction to Forensic Science

If any of the courses are not available at the moment, you can add it to your watchlist and receive an email if there are new session dates announced.

You would first be required to sign up with Coursera.

Top photo from here

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