To begin the fall semester, Princeton has enhanced its program of open online course offerings with two new courses and self-paced versions of previously offered courses. Unlike session-based courses, which unfold over a specific time period, self-paced courses provide all the course material at once and have no course end date. This highly flexible course format allows learners to view video lectures and engage in learning activities on their own schedules and enables them to choose their own paths through the material. Because all the learning materials are always available, interested learners can access the materials for reinforcement at any time. 

Peter Singer’s new online course, Effective Altruism, his second offering, is the first course from Princeton that was designed from the outset for self-paced study. Other popular Princeton courses which first ran as session-based courses in 2014, have been redesigned for this new format and are now available:  

• Imagining Other Earths, from David Spergel
• Paradoxes of War, from Miguel Centeno
• Buddhism and Buddhism and Modern Psychology, from Robert Wright

A number of other courses from Princeton faculty which were previously offered in session-based form will become available in the self-paced format in the near future.

In addition to Princeton’s self-paced offerings, several session-based courses have opened this month:  

• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, from Arvind Narayanan (including lectures from Edward Felten, and others) 
• Algorithms, Parts 1 and 2, from Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne (new sessions)
• Analysis of Algorithms and Analytic Combinatorics from Robert Sedgewick (new sessions)

Princeton’s free, non-credit courses offered through Coursera, Kadenze and NovoEd are available to anyone around the world. The McGraw Center is the campus home for Princeton's initiative in online education.