Bloomberg Businessweek:  Duke University, Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology have joined Stanford and Princeton universities in offering free online courses through startup Coursera Inc.

A total of 16 schools are now partners with Coursera, the Mountain View, California-based company said today in a statement. Caltech and the University of Pennsylvania will also invest a combined $3.7 million in the company.

Coursera, founded last year by two Stanford computer science professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, offers university classes online, with the aim of educating millions of people globally for free. The company, which raised $16 million earlier this year from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates, will receive an additional combined $2.3 million from the venture capital firms, both of which are based in Menlo Park, California.

“We have a tremendous amount of great ideas on how to make the platform a terrific place,” Koller said in a telephone interview. “That requires engineering resources.”…