Two months ago, to take a course from the University of Pennsylvania's medical school, you needed to excel at a grueling admissions test and pray you were one of the few who got accepted - not to mention pay tuition once you got there.

Now you can stumble out of bed halfway around the world and still catch courses taught by Penn medical professors.

All for free, at the moment.

Both the medical school and the university are amping up their participation in the online education game. Fifteen Penn professors are now signed up to offer free classes over the online learning platform Coursera (www.coursera.org), including seven from the Perelman School of Medicine.

One is bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, whose just-completed Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act class attracted more than 30,000 students - about 5,000 more than the Penn student body.

Emanuel's class is being outdrawn by Wharton School professor Kevin Werbach's Gamification, which starts Aug. 27 and will apply game-design techniques to business problems. Its 50,000 sign-ups top the Penn offerings so far.

Last month, Penn joined with the California Institute of Technology to invest $3.7 million in Coursera, which now offers 117 free courses from 16 official partners, including Stanford, Duke, and Princeton Universities. The University of California Berkeley and two Indian colleges also offer classes on Coursera but are not yet official partners.

The online courses mimic aspects of a traditional experience by having not only video lectures, but also strict class start and end dates, homework assignments, interactive quizzes, and discussion boards for students.

"Coursera feels like a good partner for us," said Deirdre Woods, interim executive director of Penn's Open Learning Initiative, which is for now primarily devoted to the Coursera project. "Penn is about rigor . . . and [Coursera's] philosophy was very much in line with that."

Of Penn's 16 online courses, two are currently in session and more will start up in the next several months.

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Penn amps up role in Coursera online-education effort