The new course, “A Gentle Introduction to Python,” will blend content from M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare, instant-feedback exercises and quizzes from Codecademy, and study groups organized by OpenStudy, and will be coordinated through an e-mail list operated by Peer 2 Peer University.

“The MOOCs that have come out in the last six months are really incredible and have truly moved the needle for online learning, but they are based on very sophisticated central platforms and require significant resources to develop,” Philipp Schmidt, Peer 2 Peer University’s co-founder, said in a statement. “The mechanical MOOC is an attempt to leverage the power of the open Web, by loosely joining together a set of independent building blocks,” he said.

The mechanical MOOC will not be as tightly structured as the free courses now offered by leading universities like Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania through Coursera or edX, which have enrolled more than a million students. (While M.I.T. is involved in both edX and the new project, they are separate.)

… The collaborators say that the components of education — content, community and assessment — all exist online, although not in one place. Combining top sites for each, they say, should result in a course that is as good as the far more costly approach taken by Coursera, edX and others, albeit a less polished experience, where the pieces are not custom-created to fit together neatly. If the first course works, they say, it could spur many more  similar offerings.

Via The New York Times