Case Western Reserve University will be offering three Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, beginning in late April and early May, including one new course, “Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies,” taught by visiting Assistant Professor Michael Goldberg from the Weatherhead School of Management.

MOOCs are online courses run through coursera.com. They are free of charge and open to anyone with an Internet connection. In addition to the traditional course materials such as videos, readings and problems sets, MOOCs also provide interactive user forums that help build a community for students, professors and teaching assistants.

Goldberg’s course follows the journey of entrepreneurs from northeast Ohio and select transitioning economies around the world across the stages of building a business. It covers topics such as structuring government and donor support for entrepreneurship, leveraging anchor institutions and raising investment capital.

“This online course will provide a path for understanding how transitioning economies around the world are working to catalyze entrepreneurship,” said Goldberg.

The class will be structured with a short session lecture format, using 10 to 12 minute documentary style videos.

Over 13,000 people have already enrolled in Goldberg’s course, which kicks off on April 28.

The other two courses, “Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence,” taught by Richard Boyatzis, and “Introduction to International Criminal Law,” taught by Michael Scharf, have both run twice already on Coursera.

In the past, CWRU’s MOOCs have performed slightly better than their other university-hosted counterparts, with seven percent of all students enrolled completing Scharf’s course, compared to the national average of four percent.