The Higher School of Economics Partners Up with Coursera

The HSE is now a partner of Coursera, a leading massive open online course (MOOC) platform. Students from all over the world will now have free access to educational courses delivered by professors of the Higher School of Economics. The HSE will upload several courses in economics in English and in Russian on Coursera’s website. The HSE has also developed a course in intercultural communication — Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication - specifically for international audiences interested in Russia.

Launched in late 2011, Coursera topped TIME's best educational websites list in 2012. Coursera offers open online courses from the world's top universities, featuring video lectures, assignments, tests, and exams. The Higher School of Economics joined the project on October 23, 2013 as one of the first Russian universities to partner up with Coursera. Most of Coursera's partners are European and American universities. Coursera's cooperation with Russia began in early 2013.

"We joined the project at the right time," says HSE Vice Rector Sergey Roschin. “Russian students are among Coursera's top twenty most active users, and the Russian-speaking audience is increasingly interested in free distance learning. Today, our university offers a number of basic economics courses as well as courses in applied mathematics, psychology, and courses at the intersection of these disciplines designed by our leading professors. In addition, we have developed two specialist courses beyond the core program—one in using the LaTeХ publishing system, eg for getting your paper published in international peer-reviewed journals where most serious scholarly articles are written using this format, and the other one in intercultural communication with Russians for international audiences interested in Russia. We plan to add courses in the future and to offer more of them in English."

At the moment, the HSE offers twelve courses on its page with Coursera, including Financial Markets and Institutions, Fundamentals of Corporate Finance, Public Economics, Core Concepts in Data Analysis, History of Economic Thought, Microeconomics Principles, Macroeconomics, Introduction to Neuroeconomics: How the Brain Makes Decisions, Industrial Organization, Labor Economics, Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication, and Introduction to LaTeX. The page will be regularly updated with new courses from the HSE.

"We are very excited to welcome HSE to the platform,” said Coursera co-founder, Stanford Professor Daphne Koller. “Participation on Coursera by Russian students has increased 230% over the last 6 months, making it clear that there is growing demand for open access to higher education. Partnering with HSE, one of the nation's leading research universities, helps ensure that our Russian Courserians not only have access to the top universities in the world, but also to the top universities within their own country."  

Coursera has more than 5 million users. Its website offers more than 460 courses in biology, computer science, economics, education, electronics, humanities and social sciences, mathematics, medicine, and life sciences from 91 universities. The audiences of Coursera's online courses speak Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Chinese, Arabic, and many other languages, as well as English. Coursera offers video lectures by professors from Princeton, Stanford, Michigan, Columbia, and Pennsylvania Universities, the University of Edinburgh, the Johns Hopkins University, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Toronto, among others.

Coursera carefully selects its partner universities: they should rank among the best in their countries (as reflected in global rankings) and they must be approved by the Coursera Advisory Board of professors from leading universities.

National Research University - Higher School of Economics (HSE) is one of the top research universities in Russia. Established in 1992 as a school of economics, it now offers programs at all levels of university education across an extraordinary range of fields of study including management, sociology, psychology, culture studies, history, philosophy, public administration, political science, international relations, law, oriental studies, media communications, philology, linguistics, computer sciences, mathematics, engineering, and design.