*Photo: Dmitry Baranovskiy / Flickr. *

New York University is teaming up with the computer programming tutorial site Codecademy to offer a free, non-credit programming class for NYU students. The pilot program will run from Sept. 28 through Dec. 7, 2012.

Codecademy seeks to democratize computer programming by offering lessons via the web, and this NYU partnership puts a new spin on that mission – and may lend it some added legitimacy. According to Codecademy CEO Zach Sims, NYU has basically built a course around the existing Codecademy curriculum. "We've helped by recommending pieces of the curriculum and giving suggestions on how to run the program," Sims says. In addition to Codecademy's interactive lessons, the course will include monthly guest speakers.

NYU has a history of offering creative ways to introduce coding to its students. For example, Adam Parrish teaches a course called "Reading and Writing Electronic Text" as part of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. The course uses Python programming techniques to teach experimental creative writing. Students learn to use the language's text processing features to manipulate or generate or rearrange text to create new works. For example, students could create an digital version of the Burroughs and Gysin cut-up technique.

Codecademy launched last year with the mission of making it possible for absolutely anyone to learn to program. What makes it stand out from many other online programming tutorials in that students can complete all the lessons within their web browsers. There is no need to download or install any programming languages or development software.

In January, the company launched its CodeYear campaign to get people to pledge to learn to program in 2012. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg famously made the pledge. Meanwhile, Codecademy's curriculum is being used by companies to teach non-technical staff to code, and is starting to see some success.

Codecademy is starting to expand its scope as well. It started out teaching JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but in July the company added tutorials for the programming language Python. It also recently and also published a curriculum for those wishing to run after school programs for teaching code.