Chapel Hill, N.C. — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is partnering with online education provider Coursera to offer free, non-credit classes to online learners across the world, the university said Thursday.

The first four open online courses will begin in fall 2013.

'Partnering with Coursera represents one more way we can make Carolina and the high-quality teaching of our faculty accessible to online learners,” Chancellor Holden Thorp said in a statement Thursday. “This is the next logical step to expanding our online presence." 

Five UNC faculty members are participating: Lorraine Alexander and Karin Yeatts from the Gillings School of Public Health, Evan Feldman from the department of music in the College of Arts and Sciences, Don Hornstein from the School of Law and Jeffrey Pomerantz from the School of Information and Library Science.

More than 60 universities around the world provide course lectures and content online through Coursera, but UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University are the first universities in North Carolina to do so.