Tag Archives: mooc

Providers of Free MOOC’s Now Charge Employers for Access to Student Data

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On Tuesday, Coursera, which works with high-profile colleges to provide massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, announced its employee-matching service, called Coursera Career Services. Some high-profile tech companies have already signed up—including Facebook and Twitter, according to a post on Coursera’s blog, though officials would not disclose how much employers pay for the service. Only students who opt into the service will be included in the system that participating employers see, a detail stressed in an e-mail message that Coursera sent to its nearly two million past or present students on Tuesday.

via Providers of Free MOOC’s Now Charge Employers for Access to Student Data – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business

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Online education isn’t new—in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time “distance learning” programs. What’s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this month’s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”).

via Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business | MIT Technology Review.

Will they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we’ll have the answer to our question: online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years.

From:  MOOCs will eat academia

MOOCs will al­most cer­tainly hol­low out the teach­ing com­po­nent of uni­ver­si­ties as it stands today. I don’t see any­thing on the hori­zon that will re­verse this tide. In most tech­ni­cal fields, the nuts and bolts tech­ni­cal in­ter­view and on-the-job learn­ing and per­for­mance mon­i­tor­ing long ago re­placed any faith in de­grees as cre­den­tials. That leaves very few fields, such as law, where you ab­solutely do need the de­gree as a cre­den­tial.