Coursera has announced on its blog early Wednesday that 17 universities including Ivy League members, Brown and Columbia have joined in its mission to offer free online education globally.

With this, Coursera now hosts roughly 200 courses from 33 domestic and international universities and reaches over 1.3 million students across the globe.

The organization hopes these 17 universities will expand the course offerings even further, adding new classes in the fields of music, medicine, and humanities, among other disciplines, from renowned professors like Arnold Weinstein of Brown University and Grammy award winning Gary Burton from Berklee College of Music.

Apart from those mentioned, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Ohio State University, University of British Columbia, University of California-Irvine, University of Florida, University of London, University of Maryland, University of Melbourne, University of Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt University, Wesleyan University will also be offering courses.

The course catalogue of Coursera is already featuring many of the upcoming courses by the newly-added universities and they look promising. "The Science of Gastronomy" from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, "Financial Engineering and Risk Management" from Columbia University, "The Camera Never Lies", "Songwriting" and "The Language of Hollywood" by Berklee are already garnering positive responses.

Since its first course offerings six months ago, Coursera is propelling towards new heights of providing excellent education by dissolving geographical and financial barriers helping students across the world to acquire knowledge.

Students have access to valuable experiences beyond lectures and on-campus activities through Coursera's extensive community engagement opportunities, which include in-person Meetups in over 600 cities around the world, thousands of community forums on Coursera, and professor and student-organized networking.

"Over the coming months, we will continue to focus on bringing the best educational content and support systems to people around the world so that they can continue to enrich their lives through learning," said Andrew Ng, Coursera co-founder in a press release.

With so many courses being offered for free, the students' only concern is time-management. As if to echo every Coursera student's worry, one of the comments on facebook says, "Now if you can just add a few more hours to a day!"