NIU students and faculty have collaborated to create a public online course.

The course will be similar to the general education course Disability in Society, but will last 10 weeks instead of 16.

The new online course, called Perspectives on Disability, will be led by Greg Long, allied health and communicative disorders professor.

Long formed a development seminar with a group of students, including those with and without disabilities, who worked to develop class materials and create an online experience.

The course type, known as a massive open online course (MOOC), is a new endeavor for NIU. Although it is not an official course at NIU, it will be used to see how open online courses will fit into NIU’s Vision 2020 plan, a set of university-wide benchmarks.