Coursera expands foreign-language classes with help of new international partners

Providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs) tend to be based in elite pockets of the United States (Silicon Valley and Boston, for example), but their students increasingly come from all corners of the world. And to attract and accommodate a more global student body, online education startup Coursera on Thursday said that it had added even more school partners, about half of which are international, to offer more courses reflecting different languages, perspectives and disciplines.

The Palo Alto-based company said it had added 29 new academic partners, 16 of which are international, nearly doubling its list of institutional partners (you can see a full list of new schools below). With its new partners, the startup will not only offer courses in French (it already launched a course with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), but also Spanish, Italian and Chinese.

Since launching nearly a year ago, the company said it has registered almost 2.8 million users and gets about 1.45 million enrollments per month. It has also launched certificate-oriented tracks and received approval from the American Council on Education (ACE) for credit equivalency for a few of its courses to give its students more opportunities to earn degrees and find jobs.

But that fast growth has not come without some pain. In the last month, the startup has twice run into a bit of turbulence with its classes. Earlier this month, it suspended a class after student complaints about technical glitches and the design of the class. And, this week, a professor departed a course midway through.

While those incidents throw a bit of cold water on the MOOC hype, they show that the model is still in its infancy and, hopefully, the lessons from their aftermath will be instructive for classes to come.

With its new partners, Coursera now has agreements with 62 academic institutions. You can see a full list of its new partners below:

California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
Case Western Reserve University
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Curtis Institute of Music
Ecole Polytechnique, France
IE Business School
Leiden University, Netherlands
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat München
National Taiwan University
National University of Singapore
Northwestern University
Penn State University
Rutgers University
Sapienza Università di Roma
Technische Universität München (TUM)
Technical University of Denmark
The University of Tokyo
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Universidad TecVirtual del Sistema Tecnológico de Monterrey
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
University of California, San Diego
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of Colorado, Boulder
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
University of Geneva, Switzerland
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of Rochester
University of Wisconsin-Madison