At 3 a.m. on Wednesday, Columbia opened registration for its first two massive open online courses.

The University is offering the two coursesFinancial Engineering and Risk Management, and Natural Language Processingthrough Coursera, an online education platform founded by Stanford University professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng last year. Its Columbias first major venture into the online education market in a decade.

Were doing a pilot program in the MOOC stagemassive open online courseand the idea there is to see the potential of the MOOC stage for education, said Sree Sreenivasan, who was appointed Columbias first chief digital officer in July. What Im trying to do in my position is to help see whats working, try new things, and to expand and enhance what weve already done and built at Columbia.

Sreenivasan said that several Columbia schools, including the School of Continuing Education, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Journalism, and Teachers College, have had assorted online education offerings for years. But this is the first time Columbia is offering courses that are free and open to anyone in the world with Internet access.

Both courses will begin on Feb. 11, 2013, and run for 10 weeks. According to descriptions on Courseras website, the workload for each course will be eight to 10 hours per week. Industrial engineering and operations research professors Garud Iyengar and Martin Haugh will teach Financial Engineering and Risk Management, and computer science professor Michael Collins will teach Natural Language Processing.

The plan is to give people a broad introduction into the method of financial engineering and risk management and option pricing for portfolio optimization and also a healthy degree of skepticism, Haugh said of his course. Obviously, these models have come under a lot of criticism in the last few years ... so we hope to address some of these issues as well.

Thirty-three schoolsincluding the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, and Princeton Universitycurrently offer or are planning to offer classes on Coursera. The more than one million people who have enrolled in the sites courses are expected to pay attention during video lectures interspersed with interactive exercises and complete homework assignments in between lectures.

Kyle Rego, SEAS 13, called Columbias new online courses a fantastic opportunity, noting that he is currently enrolled in the in-person version of Natural Language Processing.

If I didnt have the opportunity to go to Columbia I would definitely take a course online, he said. I could easily see other people wanting to.

For free, this is amazing, he added.

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University trying hand at online education