By D. D. GUTTENPLAN, NY Times
The University of London has been in the distance learning business since 1858 Adrian Smith, the university’s new vice chancellor, reminded his audience. Pointing out that there are 52,000 students enrolled in the university’s international programs — who take the same exams as their counterparts in Bloomsbury and receive a University of London degree — Mr. Smith said “there has been an incredible amount of hype” about the online courses. “However, you ignore them at your peril,” he said. “The challenges they pose to the traditional classroom model of knowledge transmission are obvious. The question is no longer whether we should consider MOOCs, but how quickly to get involved.” William Lawton, the director of the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, the British research group that organized the conference, said that MOOCs had grown out of the movement for open educational resources. “Originally, the ideal was about widening access to elite courses,” he said. “But can it still be about widening access when it’s increasingly about finding new business models and competitive advantage?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/world/europe/18iht-educside18.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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