Coursera, a startup built around the global classroom business model, announced new partnerships with an additional 12 universities, bringing the total to 16 major universities now offering in free, online courses. The larger span of universities now on board brings a range of information technology courses, from the fundamentals of algorthms to machine learning and security. 
Along with the original four institutions as part of Coursera -- Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and the University of Michigan — Coursera is also partnering with Johns Hopkins University, University of Toronto, University of Illinois, University of Washington, CalTech, Rice University, Duke University, University of California San Francisco, University of Virginia, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Edinburgh, and Ecole PolyTechnique Federale de Lausanne.
Coursera is the brainchild of Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, who developed the university’s first online education platform, which served two courses and had a total enrollment of about 200,000. Coursera also recently received $16 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates.
Information technology course offerings now include the following:
Algorithms, Part I, Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne, Princeton (starts August 12)
Algorithms, Part II, Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne, Princeton (November)
Artificial Intelligence Planning, Gerhard Wickler, Austin Tate, University of Edinburgh (starts January 28)
Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps, Lawrence Angrave, University of Illinois (start date to be announced)
Computer Architecture, David Wentzlaff, Princeton (September)
Control of Mobile Robots, Magnus Egerstedt, Georgia Institute of Technology (start date to be announced)
Cryptography, Dan Boneh, Stanford (August 27)
Heterogeneous Parallel Programming, Wen-mei W. Hwu, University of Illinois (start date September 24)
Information Security and Risk Management in Context, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, University of Washington (start date to be announced)
Internet History, Technology, and Security, Charles Severance, University of Michigan (start date July 23)
Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, Joe Warren, Scott Rixner, John Greiner, Stephen Wong, Rice University (start date October 15)
Learn to Program: Crafting Quality Code, Jennifer Campbell, Paul Gries, University of Toronto (start date to be announced)
Machine Learning, Andrew Ng, Stanford (starts August 20)
Natural Language Processing, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Manning, Stanford (start date to be announced)
Networked Life, Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania (September)
Neural Networks for Machine Learning, Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto (starts September 17)
Probabalistic Graphical Models, Daphne Koller, Stanford (starts September 24)
Social Network Analysis ,Lada Adamic, University of Michigan (September)
Photo: Princeton University Office of Communications.)
(Portions of this article were cross-posted ar SmartPlanet Business Brains.)