Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org or you can subscribe,

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Today is March 10, 2014, and my guest is John Cochran. The AQR Capital Management Distinguished

Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He's also a

senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. John, welcome back to Econ Talk.

It's a pleasure to be here. John, you recently taught your first MOOC, and that stands for

Massive Open Online Course, and we're going to talk about that experience, what you learned,

and what you think of the potential for MOOCs to disrupt traditional education. Let's start with

the course itself. What was the subject matter and give us a rough idea of what it covered?

So I decided from my first MOOC to do a PhD level asset pricing class. So it's the first

PhD course in asset pricing, and it covers the standard theory of how we think about stock bonds

and how they relate to the macroeconomy. I did that course first because it's very

straightforward material. Not a lot of interpretation. It's kind of math that you learn and

learn to interpret, and I thought that would poured well to MOOCs in my first effort, and then I

could go on and do more discussion and interpretive stuff once I learned the technology.

What was the, do you have the formal name of the class? Does it have a formal name?

Asset pricing. That's the name. Asset pricing. Yes, go to Coursera and look up asset pricing,

and you'll be able to look at it now. I leave it open for people who are interested.

So anybody can go there now and take it for free, or do you have to pay something?

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