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US online course on Thomas Jefferson to be launched with free access for Chinese audiences
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A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson will be launched on Monday, February 17, in commemoration of US Presidents’ Day. Free online access is offered to Chinese audiences and their worldwide counterparts.
The course, called “Age of Jefferson,” is offered by the University of Virginia and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
Jefferson is one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. He is the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, and is the nation’s third president. In 1819 he founded the University of Virginia, which he considered to be one of his greatest achievements. Together with Monticello, his home in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia is recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the only American university and one of only four universities worldwide so designated.
The course will be offered worldwide online without charge through Coursera, which was founded by professors from Stanford University.
MOOCs have become a hot topic in higher education around the world, and recently both Tsinghua and Peking universities have begun to offer MOOCs in Chinese, including some from American universities translated from English into Chinese.
Peking University has been a partner with Coursera since last September and offers many courses through the educational technology company’s online learning platform.
In many ways, MOOCs achieve Jefferson’s vision for public education and for making knowledge available to all people, something he articulated over 200 years ago.
“A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest, of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest,” Jefferson wrote in 1818.
The MOOC on Jefferson will be translated into simplified Chinese and will be accessible in China through Coursera’s partner NetEase, thereby removing the barriers of language that have prevented more Chinese students from participating in online courses in the past.
The six-week course is entirely free, registration is open and the course begins on Monday, February 17. The workload is estimated to be 1-3 hours each week.
The course instructor is Professor Peter S. Onuf, who taught at the University of Virginia for more than 20 years and is one of the world’s preeminent Jefferson scholars and a historian of the early American Republic.
The course will be accessible with simplified Chinese subtitles over NetEase’s China server, as well as through Coursera and iTunes U, according to the organizer.
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