by: JENNA ROSS, Star Tribune
Take a computer science course from Harvard, study circuits with a pair of MIT professors or master machine learning in a Stanford University class, all from a laptop in Minneapolis. Tuition? Free. These so-called MOOCs, or “massive open online courses,” are being offered by an ever-growing number of the country’s most elite universities. As they proliferate, they are forcing traditional colleges to confront tricky questions about their own cost and credits. But some scholars warn against hyping these online courses as higher education’s salvation before studying whether they’re working. “MOOCs have been around for a long time. They’re called books,” said U chemistry Prof. Christopher Cramer. “The model removes an instructor from the equation … so what’s left is just content. It may be really well-designed content, if you’re willing to spend the money, but it’s just content.”
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