by Reeve Hamilton, NY Times
“The territory is so new here,” Mr. Gosling, a tenured professor, said the next morning. “Are we essentially televising a class or are we trying to make a kind of educational TV show?” The answer, he said, is probably somewhere in between, following a trend toward online courses intended to extend the reach of higher education beyond a university’s campus. As the class began, about 800 U.T-Austin students — not including roughly two dozen who had been chosen to be the studio audience — participated remotely, using computers or mobile devices. Students from outside U.T.-Austin were also able to sign up for the course. (The University of Texas at Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.) The structure of the course invites a comparison to the massive open online courses, known as MOOCs, which are offered free — though typically not for credit — to anyone with an Internet connection. U.T.-Austin will launch its first four MOOCs this semester.
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