IT Article of the Week

What You Need to Know about MOOC’s (Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2012)

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) appear to be the next step in a trend that started a few years ago with prominent colleges putting some of their course content online. The next step was for faculty to offer free online courses on their own and later these were offered through the institution. Today we see four main companies (edX, Coursera, Udacity and Udemy) offering these courses to thousands of students in conjunction with academic institutions and professors. These courses are offered at no cost (even the course materials are free) and at the end of the course a student can receive a certificate or badge for completion. At this point it is unclear if this is just a popular fad or if MOOC’s are on the path of introducing a disruptive change to the higher education marketplace. Either way, it is good to know about this trend and the short Chronicle of Higher Education article provides a brief outline with a timeline of past articles/podcasts on MOOC’s.

What You Need to Know about MOOC’s - http://chronicle.com/article/What-You-Need-to-Know-About/133475/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en