The University of Toronto is the first institution in Canada to use the Coursera platform, which delivers 43 courses to more than half a million students worldwide. U of T's computer science department will offer three courses of its own, including two introductory courses to programming and one focusing on neural networks and machine learning.
Coursera was designed to give people lacking access to high-quality education around the world a simple way to get it. Known as "massive open online courses," they can be taught by some of the top professors in the world. At U of T, for example, the neural networks and machine learning course will be taught by Professor Geoffrey Hinton, a world-renowned expert in the field.