Peking and Tsinghua universities to offer free courses online

Two of the mainland's most prestigious institutions of higher learning, Peking and Tsinghua universities, will start offering free online courses in partnership with EdX, a major open-course provider.

Peking University announced earlier this week it would make four courses, including electronic circuits and the study of folklore, available to students around the world through the EdX web platform starting on Monday. Tsinghua University will make available two courses - the history of Chinese architecture and principles of electric circuits, starting on October 18, according to an EdX schedule.

The introduction of Chinese-language courses from Peking and Tsinghua comes after the two universities signed a deal with EdX in May and spent subsequent months preparing the courses.

Li Xiaoming , an online and information systems professor overseeing the web offerings at Peking University, was previously quoted by mainland media as saying the university planned to offer about 100 courses through EdX within five years. EdX, a major provider of massive online open courses, or Mooc, was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. It has signed up 29 global universities - including Harvard, MIT and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology - as partners.

Its competitor Coursera, which was founded in April last year by two computer science professors at Stanford University and which has more than 60 partner schools, signed up two additional mainland institutions, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in July.

But neither institution has announced plans about which courses it would offer or when their programme would begin.

While it is free to access non-profit Mooc platforms, Coursera said it would charge students between US$60 and US$90 for exams proctored by a third party.