In a sense Alan Turing’s cryptography, code breaking and computer science work at Bletchley Park featured in the Imitation Game movie was the kickoff for the modern day Internet and well as modern day electronic computing technologies. For the first time in history, communication was essential for survival and applying computation to understanding communication was critical to success or failure in World War II. There was unprecedented funding poured into research into mathematics, computer science, social science, linguistics, and many other fields. Bletchley Park was one of the world’s first great large-scale cross-disciplinary research labs. The creativity and innovation at Bletchley Park had a tremendous impact on the results of World War II and the shape of our world to the present day.

If you are interested in learning how we got from Bletchley Park to today’s Internet – I would invite you to attend my free self-paced Internet History, Technology, and Security course on Coursera.

IHTS was one of the first 20 pioneering MOOCs as Coursera was rolled out in 2012 (yes two years seems like a long time ago). And now IHTS is one of the first Coursera courses to pioneer a new self-paced format that allows students to start and take courses at any time and at their own pace.

We initially have soft-launched IHTS so students can view all of the lectures and supplementary materials. Over the coming months, we will be adding quizzes and other assessments so that the self-paced offering includes all the features of the previous scheduled cohort based offerings on Coursera – except with no deadlines :).

The course is a mix of lectures and interviews with Internet innovators. All of the course materials are open and available under a CC-BY Creative Commons License to allow reuse of the lecture materials.

I hope to see you in class.