By Rachel Coleman, Leader and Times
Through the nonprofit, Internet-based organization Coursera, hundreds of classes offered by top-notch universities around the world are now available for free to anyone who cares to enroll. These Massive Online Open Courses, or MOOCs, have exploded in the past two years. A few higher-learning institutions, like MIT, have made course materials available to the public for years. Now, however, it seems everybody wants to give MOOCs a try. It’s not clear how staging a class like The Modern World, offered by University of Virginia last year, at a cost to the private university in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, ultimately makes money for the learning institution. For now, all of them – Princeton, Yale, the University of Edinburgh, for heaven’s sake — seem giddy with the thrill of learning for its own sake, made available to the masses.
Share on Facebook