Coursera is an online education platform for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take for free. MOOCs give anyone, anywhere, the possibility to acquire a world-class education.  Courses include video lectures, exercises and online interaction with teachers and other students. Some courses offer certification as well.

The Princeton Bitcoin course will last six weeks, with the last lecture on November 1, 2015, but students also will be able to follow the video lectures after that date. That's part of the appeal of MOOCs –students who prefer to learn at their own pace can follow the video lectures asynchronously, when they want, while students who can adapt their schedules to a course's official timetable have the added benefit of semi-synchronous interaction with the instructors.

"To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level," notes the Coursera website. "After this course, you'll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You'll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you'll be able to integrate ideas from Bitcoin in your own projects."

The Freedom to Tinker website, hosted by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, notes that a preliminary version of the Princeton Bitcoin course has been publicly available since January, with 11 video lectures, lecture notes and exercises, on the Piazza online educational platform. The new Coursera version includes new lectures, embedded quizzes to test the students' understanding, and a wider community of students to discuss the lectures with. About 15,000 students already have signed up, and the enrollment is growing fast.