That’s about to change. Yale announced on Wednesday that it would soon offer MOOCs through Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based company.

Yale plans to offer four courses beginning in January, focusing on constitutional law, financial markets, morality, and Roman architecture.

The move was a long time coming. Yale, which in 2007 became among the first institutions to make its course content available free on the Web with its Open Yale Courses lecture series, has taken a distinctly deliberate approach to MOOCs. Last fall it convened a faculty committee to recommend a broad online agenda that would encompass MOOCs as well as other forms of online teaching.

“We understand that there are institutional considerations (ranging from entrance fees to intellectual-property issues to regulatory-compliance matters) that may govern which MOOC platforms could be pursued by Yale,” the committee wrote in a report last December.

Nevertheless, it continued, “we recommend that Yale should use one or more of the new MOOC platforms to continue the free, online dissemination of Yale’s teaching materials.”

Apart from MOOCs, the committee recommended that Yale begin offering online language courses for credit “that could be available to Yale College students as well as students enrolled at peer universities elsewhere.”

Coursera, meanwhile, announced on Wednesday that it had created partnerships with a raft of companies and nonprofit groups that will work on translating its MOOCs into various foreign languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian, which are the native tongues of a number of countries where Coursera’s English-language MOOCs have been popular.

There is substantial demand worldwide for American higher education, but experts have warned that MOOC providers that wish to serve a global audience face a challenge in accommodating various languages and cultures. And while many MOOCs are oriented to the common languages of mathematics and numbers, language barriers have caused some problems for MOOCs that rely on peer grading.

For its part, Coursera has focused of late on expanding overseas, where, surveys have shown, most of its registrants reside. In February, Coursera announced partnerships with 16 foreign universities.

The company said its efforts to serve non-English speakers would happen in phases. “For the time being, course lectures will be translated via subtitles while all other course material, including quizzes and assignments, will remain in the course’s original language,” it said in its news release. “Coursera’s long-term goal is to have our platform localized to global audiences.”

That’s how Brian Whitmer, a founder of Instructure, describes the education-technology sector, particularly the space occupied by developers of learning-management systems like Instructure’s Canvas. “It’s become clear that ed tech does not have the type of ecosystem that other sectors have,” he said. “It’s hampering innovation. We need to fix that.”

To call attention to that problem, Instructure and other learning-management-system providers, including Blackboard and Desire2Learn, are offering cash rewards to encourage the creation of apps using the Learning Tools Interoperability standard, or LTI.

Similar to Facebook apps, LTI apps focus on a specific function that may be missing from a larger platform—a better way to track grades, for example—while taking advantage of the platform’s existing features, like basic log-in methods and messaging services. The LTI standard, which was released by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, a learning-technology nonprofit organization, in 2010, then allows those apps to function for any of those learning-management systems at once.

Developers can focus on what an app can accomplish, rather than building separate apps for each system, Mr. Whitmer said. The standard is particularly helpful for start-up and niche companies, he added.

Called the LTI App Bounty, the new competition will award $250 for every eligible app and $1,000 for the “best apps,” as determined by a panel of judges that includes Audrey Watters, a technology journalist; Chuck Severance, a co-founder of the online-learning community Sakai; and David Wiley, an open-education advocate. The contest began on Monday, following its announcement at the IMS Global Conference, and will last until June 10.

“We want to try to kick-start things,” Mr. Whitmer said. “We want to see more innovation. As they say, a rising tide will lift all ships. We want to make people realize the value of this ecosystem.”

Mr. Whitmer said the competition is open to anybody who can build an LTI app, and the types of apps he’s expecting to see will, he hopes, be just as varied. From finding a way to drop a map application into a system’s learning module to developing a digital-badge system to track attendance, he encouraged developers to “go crazy.”

Mr. Whitmer said he hoped the competition would be an early step in a movement to free up the space for smaller and independent developers and to create more openness among the companies involved in the competition.

“We’re a little bit behind the rest of the industry in terms of openness,” he said. “I’ve talked to a lot of the small players in the space who get that, and they’re going to help light a fire and get us caught up. They’re going to help people understand that it’s not scary and you’re not losing anything by becoming more open.”

Disability Rights Advocates represented three Berkeley students who said they had difficulty getting access to the materials they needed for class. The group, which is a nonprofit disability-rights legal center, approached the university last year on behalf of the students, proposing settlement negotiations that could resolve the issues and avoid a lawsuit. The negotiations, which took more than a year, led to several new accommodations, said Paul Hippolitus, director of the university’s Disabled Students Program, who called them overdue.

Over the past four years, the program struggled to keep up with a 115-percent increase in the number of textbooks it had to recreate in digital text, Braille, or audio form, Mr. Hippolitus said. Last semester the university created 750 such new versions.

“We had an old model that was not serving us well in this increase of quantity and quality,” Mr. Hippolitus said.

Under the new system, the staff that is dedicated to producing the alternative media will grow from three to five. Until this year, it had been a staff of one, Mr. Hippolitus said. The staff will also be moved to a larger space with new equipment. The new technology and employees will allow the program to offer more support for students and professors, helping answer students’ questions and lobbying faculty members to provide students with advance notice of what reading materials they will require.

The program hadn’t previously been able to offer those services, as the staff had been so busy just producing the materials the students needed, Mr. Hippolitus said.

“We didn’t have the time to attend to those niceties,” he said. “They are really important, but we didn’t have time while getting the books out.”

Additionally, the settlement requires the university to offer alerts and reminders to students to submit what they need in advance of a semester. The students will then get alternative versions of textbooks within 10 business days of a request and alternative course readers within 17 business days. If the wait is too long, students will be able to use self-scanning stations to produce their own materials.

Mr. Hippolitus said the university was not sure how much the new services would cost other than the extra $120,000 in salaries for the program’s new staff members.

The new system will also provide greater access to books in the university’s library. The program will inform the library which students at Berkeley—there are about 70—require the alternative media, and library staff members will scan books for those students using a new $20,000 scanner, Mr. Hippolitus said. The machine is different from the equipment used by Mr. Hippolitus’s program, as it leaves through pages, rather than requiring them to be cut out.

“Prior to the agreement, there was no real, defined process how to create alternative media for library holdings,” Mr. Hippolitus said. “It was kind of a black hole. Now there’s a clarity and a process to support that.”

As students and instructors have increasing access to more media at a quicker pace, the need for improved methods of producing alternatives also grows. At the same time, the number of college students with disabilities is increasing. According to a 2009 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 11 percent of undergraduates have a disability, with most of those students having learning disabilities.

Mr. Hippolitus said universities’ systems must expand and evolve to meet those new challenges for students with disabilities.

“The broad concern is that alternative media across the country is lagging behind, and more and better systems can be created,” he said. “If this is one, we’re happy to make that contribution. If it just stimulates ideas betters than ours, then terrific. We want to know about those ideas. But either way, it gets the conversation started about alternative media.”

There’s a caveat, though. They’ll have to disclose to the rest of the class exactly how they cheated. “Of course, if the assignment is to cheat, then you’re not really cheating,” Mr. Bull admitted.

The assignment will be one unit in his new massive open online course, “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses,” which begins on Monday through the Canvas MOOC platform, run by Instructure, a course-management company. The eight-week course will explore the vocabulary, psychology, and mechanics of what he calls “successful cheating” in online learning.

Mr. Bull said he had been studying issues of cyberethics since the start of the last decade. When he began teaching, he noticed how often student cheating came up in discussions among professors.

“They are concerned about these issues,” Mr. Bull said of professors he’s talked to. “They think through this quite a bit as a faculty, and it became a topic that was always on my mind.”

For two years he conducted research on cheating, focusing not on those who get caught but those who get away with it. At the end of his study, he found his views on cheating had begun to shift. It wasn’t as black and white as he originally thought. Were some courses designed in a way for which cheating seemed the best option? Could professors do more to not just detect cheating but help create an environment where it doesn’t happen in the first place?

Those were questions he thought other people would be interested in exploring with him through a MOOC, Mr. Bull said. Cheating in online education remains a concern for many instructors and institutions, with some universities hiring online-proctoring companies to monitor students through Webcams. Others require students to take examinations at a physical testing site.

Mr. Bull’s MOOC quickly reached its cap of 1,000 participants, and he said he expects most of them will be university educators.

“I hope that the course helps us realize that we all play a role in helping reduce this,” he said. “It’s not just students’ changing their behaviors but all of us learning how to redesign learning environments.”

The start of the course will cover the basic vocabulary and different types of cheating. The course will then move into discussing the differences between online and face-to-face learning, and the philosophy and psychology behind academic integrity. One unit will examine the best practices to minimize cheating.

Another unit will explore the kinds of metaphors people use to describe cheating. “Words and phrases like ‘punishment,’ ‘getting caught,’ all those words connect to this crime metaphor,” Mr. Bull said. ”Are there other metaphors we can use? It doesn’t mean we think cheating is OK, but it may give us more insight and perspective.”

For each unit completed, participants will get a digital badge, including, yes, one that denotes they are successful cheaters. But if a student has signed up for the course hoping for some quick cheating tips to use on his next online physics quiz, he is likely to be disappointed, Mr. Bull said, as most successful cheating tactics are well known and fairly low tech.

“It’s meeting at Starbucks and taking a quiz together, or texting a friend,” he said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.”

The company said it would offer MOOCs taught by instructors in graduate programs at the Universities of California at Irvine, Virginia, and Washington; at the Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt Universities; and at some nonaffiliated organizations that train teachers.

The move marked a shift for the year-old company, which previously had focused on the traditional university curriculum. The new offerings will include practical courses—sample title, “Surviving Your Rookie Year of Teaching: Three Key Ideas and High Leverage Techniques,” from the nonprofit Match Education—as well as more-theoretical material, such as a course unit on early-childhood development from the University of Virginia.

Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, said the company saw the move as a way to improve elementary and secondary education. “Higher education is obviously very important,” she said, “but for many countries, the problem starts a lot sooner.”

Ms. Koller said she hoped some school districts would allow teachers to use Coursera’s courses to satisfy professional-development requirements.

Some of the new teacher-education MOOCs will be part of the company’s Signature Track program, where students pay for the opportunity to take proctored examinations and receive special certificates. The Signature Track program, unveiled in January, has quickly become one of Coursera’s more promising revenue streams, generating $220,000 in its first few months.

Teacher-education programs historically have provided reliable revenue to many universities, said Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

MOOCs are not likely to supplant those programs, said Mr. Pianta, but it is possible that the massive online courses could prove to be a viable mode of delivery for “a small percentage” of the curriculum. “Let’s experiment,” the dean said, “let’s find out.”

That’s the premise behind several recently formed companies that are using the Internet, particularly social networking, to help colleges and universities reach out to their alumni.

“As you advance through your career, you’ll get promoted or switch jobs,” said Brent Grinna, chief executive officer of one such company, EverTrue. “Are you going to send an e-mail every time you get a promotion? That’s unrealistic. Because of that, many schools are sitting on databases that are highly inaccurate.”

Mr. Grinna started EverTrue after being given the job of running the fund-raising campaign for his fifth-year reunion at Brown University. He said he noticed that, even though just half a decade had passed since his peers graduated, they were increasingly difficult to keep track of. A brainstorming session with a classmate who had just been hired at LinkedIn led to EverTrue’s inspiration.

“We thought, ‘Imagine something that has the data schools have on graduates but also can harness the massive amount of data on the social graph,’” Mr. Grinna said. The social graph is a web of data—such as interests, relationships, and job information—that users create by engaging in social media. Facebook, for example, often knows where someone went to college, who his or her friends are, and which of those friends were classmates.

EverTrue, which this month received $5.25-million from Bain Capital Ventures, has created an app that uses connections made through LinkedIn to let alumni find one another based on factors such as major and location. Mr. Grinna compared it to Yelp, the restaurant-review Web site, saying it makes networking as easy as finding a good restaurant.

Daniel Cohen, founder of Graduway, another start-up company intending to connect alumni, said networking opportunities were as important to many students as earning a degree.

“Students are very fickle about where they’re going,” Mr. Cohen said. “They want to get a return on their investments. They are investing a lot in an education, and as part of that education they want access to an amazing alumni network.”

Graduway works with colleges and universities to layer their brands over existing social networks. This month the company entered into a strategic relationship with LinkedIn. But simply connecting alumni to one another and to their universities is not enough, Mr. Cohen said. By creating Web pages and mobile apps with the university’s branding, the company hopes to attract alumni who actively want to help one another and give back to their colleges.

“We’ve started to unravel how you get that network to be more active,” Mr. Cohen said. “Our whole product is aimed at empowering that network to help one another. My credo is, ‘It’s not just who you know, but how willing they are to help.’”

And today’s alumni are very willing to give back, argued Jamie McDonald, chief executive officer of GiveCorps, a company that just started a fund-raising platform for alumni.

According to the 2012 Millennial Impact Report, 75 percent of respondents to a recent survey, all ages 20 to 35, said they give money to nonprofit organizations. The amounts are often not large (usually $100 or less), but the survey results suggest that members of the so-called millennial generation are active givers nonetheless, and 70 percent of their donations are made online.

Ms. McDonald said universities are behind the curve, with only 1.5 percent of higher-education donations’ being solicited online. Many universities already use social media for fund raising, according to an annual survey released this month by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. In the survey, 47 percent of college respondents said they use social media to raise money from donors, but 67 percent of the respondents have raised only $10,000 or less through that method.

Ms. McDonald said her company’s new platform, called GiveCorps.Pro, allows universities to reach more of those younger online donors by using the Internet to make donating a social experience. For instance, colleges might build fund-raising events around holidays or run competitions, such as pitting alumni from different dormitories against one another.

“This generation is an incredibly generous, passionate demographic,” Ms. McDonald said. “They are such a natural audience for giving. There’s so many natural ways to take the old concept of annual fund raising and personalize it so that a young person can make sure their $25 gift is going to matter. You can really sort of bring it home for them.”

A report on the study, “Choosing Between Online and Face-to-Face Courses: Community College Student Voices,” focuses on why students opt to take some courses online but others face to face. “Because they serve a lot of students who work and have kids, community colleges feel they need to offer more and more online courses to meet their demands,” said Shanna Smith Jaggars, the report’s author and the center’s assistant director. “But we looked at, What is the extent of that demand?”

The research, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, uses data collected in interviews with 46 students at two unidentified community colleges in the United States.

The respondents were most likely to take online courses on topics they felt more comfortable “teaching themselves.” When a student considered a subject area “difficult”—many cited mathematics and science courses as examples—they were more likely to want a traditional brick-and-mortar setting because, the report says, “they needed the immediate question-and-answer context of a face-to-face course.”

In-person formats were also more popular for courses in a student’s major or in discussion-based areas where interactions with instructors or other peers were seen as important.

A 2010 study by the U.S. Department of Education actually found that students in online courses fared better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference had to do with online students’ ability to work at their own pace and to review course content, said Christine Mullins, executive director of the Instructional Technology Council.

She also said that when online courses are done right, they can provide many opportunities for peer interaction. “It’s amazing what students can do,” she said. “They can e-mail questions, chat with classmates, do online tutorials.”

Still, the research center’s paper concludes that “most students felt they did not learn the course material as well when they took it online.”

Much research remains to be done on the best structure for online courses, Ms. Jaggars said. For the time being, “offering a few online sections is great,” she said, because it gives students with jobs and children the scheduling flexibility they need. “But offering all sections of a course online? I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Applicants have until April 30 to apply. Iversity, the Berlin-based company sponsoring the fellowships, will hold online voting for the finalists through May 23.

Stifterverband, a German nonprofit association that promotes university-industry collaborations and innovation, is putting up the money, a total of 250,000 euros, or about $325,000.

The 10 winners, to be selected by a jury, will be invited to Berlin in late June for a two-day symposium where they can share ideas with one another on ways to present their courses.

“We want to create a community” among those offering the MOOCs, says Hannes Klöpper, managing director of Iversity. The contest and fellowship are also designed to help Iversity learn more about what people need and want from MOOCs because the winners will be using its MOOC platform, says Mr. Klöpper.

Mr. Klöpper was in the United States last week promoting the contest at campuses and at the Education Innovation Summit, held here. Already, he says, interest seems high. About 1,300 people have gone through the registration to view details about the contest, and hundreds have at least begun to apply.

The proposed courses need not be Euro-centric to win—after all, he says, “there’s nothing particularly European about chemistry,” for example. But Mr. Klöpper expects many will have a global focus.

The new partnership, to be formally announced this morning at Internet2′s member meeting, will also bring high-speed Internet connections to some of the Smithsonian’s 19 museums and a technology-demonstration area in the institution’s Arts and Industry Building, which is currently being renovated. Internet2 is a nonprofit group that provides superfast network connections to some 220 college and university members.

Some individual colleges have already traded digital content with the Smithsonian. But the new partnership will make it easier for other colleges to do so as well without having to negotiate separate agreements with the cultural institution.

Shelton Waggener, senior vice president of Internet2, said in an interview that the Smithsonian had many digital collections with files too large to stream over the traditional Internet. Colleges that work through Internet2 to take advantage of the partnership will be able to connect to those materials—including three-dimensional renderings of objects in the institution’s holdings—for use in classes or research projects, Mr. Waggener said.

In recent years, Internet2 has begun working to help negotiate bulk-software deals for its member colleges, serving as a broker between major software companies and colleges. The new partnership is the first move by the networking group to serve a similar role for digital content. Mr. Waggener said he expected more content deals in coming months.

The acquisition is the latest move by the company to extend its reach into college classrooms beyond just textbooks.

In the past two years, Pearson has spent more than $1-billion acquiring and investing in education companies. In 2011 the company released OpenClass, a cloud-based learning-management system. Last year it acquired EmbanetCompass, a company that provides online-learning services to nonprofit universities.

Pearson was interested in Learning Catalytics because of its ability to provide instant feedback to instructors as well as to help students engage more effectively with peers, said Paul Corey, Pearson’s president for science, business, and technology.

“We were attracted to its abilities to enable peer interaction and peer learning,” Mr. Corey said. “It has a very sophisticated level of peer matching to ensure productive pairing.”

Learning Catalytics was founded by Eric Mazur, Brian Lukoff, and Gary King in 2011 with the goal of improving interaction between students and instructors, as well as among students. When working in groups, pairs, or teams, students don’t always pick the most effective partners, said Mr. Mazur, a professor of physics and applied physics at Harvard. Learning Catalytics uses data-mining techniques to find the right partners for them, he said. It also provides instructors with real-time information about student learning on a graphical dashboard display.

In the last year or so, the start-up company has proved to be very popular, Mr. Mazur said. In fact, it was too popular for just three people to handle.

“We’ve gone through an incredibly fast exponential growth,” he said. “Pearson is going to make it possible to grow the user base at a rate we would not have been able to maintain.”

For now, expanding the number of users is the only concrete change Pearson expects to make in the system, Mr. Corey said. The company has no plans to change the system’s pricing, he said, and would be “very conscientious” about any other shifts in its affordability, such as by pairing it with Pearson textbooks.

Mr. Lukoff, a postdoctoral fellow in technology and education, has now joined Pearson, and Mr. Mazur and Mr. King, a professor of government, will remain involved with Learning Catalytics as consultants. Even so, Mr. Mazur said he does feel a little strange about the sudden growth and acquisition of the company he helped found.

“In many respects, it’s my brainchild,” he said. “Kind of overnight, I’ve been turned from a founder into a customer.”