October is a busy month at Columbia for MOOCs (massive open online courses), with three new Coursera courses starting up just days apart.

On October 13, Barnard College Professor of Economics Perry Mehrling launched Part 2 of his six-week-long Economics of Money and Banking course. Part One explored the economics of payment systems and money markets, while Part Two will explore connections with foreign exchange and capital markets. Different than most Coursera courses, Mehrling’s MOOC is running concurrently with his live course, so he’ll be teaching both in the classroom and in cyberspace. His Columbia students will use materials from the MOOC such as video lectures, discussion forums, and quizzes to enhance their in-class work.

On October 24, Ryan Baker, associate professor of Cognitive Studies in Education at Teachers College, will start his eight-week-long Big Data in Education course. Students will learn how and when to use key methods for educational data mining and learning analytics. CCNMTL has been helping Baker and his assistants with video production and quiz creation.

On October 31, Martin Haugh and Garud Iyengar, both professors of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia, will be launching Part 1 of their seven-week-long Financial Engineering and Risk Management course, an introduction to various classes of derivative securities. This marks the second iteration of the course, which first ran in February of this year.