By Chastity Laskey | Published 8 hours ago

Around 15,000 students from more than 170 different countries enrolled in Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space, a new online course taught by UA professor Chris Impey that launched Sunday.

The course is offered in a partnership with UA and Coursera, a for-profit online education company that began negotiations with the UA in 2013. Impey teaches a similar but less rigorous online astronomy course through Udemy, another online learning platform that has about 23,000 students enrolled.

"Its neat that we now have a university partnership with Coursera and are able to do this as an official outreach from the UA," said Matthew Wenger, an educational technologist in astronomy who has worked closely with Impey. I think [it] is really exciting, and to try this new, learning platform is going to be a really nice opportunity to test out some of our course curriculum ideas.

Impey said he is looking forward to engaging with Courseras demographic.

The average age is around 30, and 50-60 percent already have a degree, he said. This isnt a typical demographic of a class I might teach here. I am looking forward to a high level of exchange.

Students can take the class for free or buy a verified completion certificate for $49. Impey said the revenue raised from the class will be split evenly between Coursera and the university.

Impey also currently teaches the Udemy course.

I just want to keep learning how to teach online better, Impey said. The data from astronomy comes from space and telescopes, so working on the Internet is pretty reasonable. Most of what we do face-to-face can be done in some version online.

Impey said he will continue the course on Udemy, because it continues to gain about 1,000 new students a month and is fairly low maintenance.

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15K students explore time and space