From the full description of the course, here are the details on how to participate:

The seminar is being offered for-credit at the University of Maryland, but held openly. External participants are invited to participate by reading the papers and participating in online discussions through Google Plus. Each reading will have a public G+ post associated with it. Each reading's post will be linked to from this study group. Participants should submit their comments on G+ as a reply to the original post. Requested deadline for submitting reading comments is Tuesday at 10am. 

Requisite disclaimer: holding the course openly is meant to be an enrichment experience for all involved. UMD is not offering any formal credit for this participation to external participants. 

Unfortunately, some of the papers might be behind a paywall. Many papers can be found for free online by searching on google scholar or google web search. If you have any problems finding a paper please, post to the comments and we will try to help. 

Post any additional questions to comments!