Reports of the death of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may have been greatly exaggerated, but predictions of a pivot toward MOOCs that are more vocational in nature (as opposed to a pathway to a liberal arts degree) appear to have been right on target.
A new MOOC platform is offering free online training for IT and cybersecurity professionals. Cybrary.IT offers 20-plus certification courses in systems administration, network administration and cybersecurity, with more on the way. More than 3,500 students worldwide have joined so far.
The University of New Mexico's latest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), Rural Health Nursing, is now open to students. This course is focused on people interested in the problems that face health care providers when resources are scarce or culturally inappropriate.
In 1996, Bill Gates declared that "content is king." Gates was talking about the Internet, and the publishing, creating, and accessing capabilities that came as a result. However, the same has been true in education for a very long time. Education - from elementary to college to corporate learning - has relied on the "sage on the stage" approach: one teacher, explaining content to a class of students. The primary value, often assumed, of the teacher is his or her content knowledge and the ability to transfer this content effectively to the students in the class.
More than 6,500 people have already signed up for the massive open online course being offered by SUNY Buffalo State, the first MOOC administered by a local college.
Cybrary.it, the free cybersecurity MOOC program that launched last week in Greenbelt, has already enrolled more than 10,000 students, according to CEO Ralph Sita.
Update: After this article appeared, Werner Koch informed us that he was awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. Werner told us he only received permission to disclose it after our article published. Meanwhile, since our story was posted, donations flooded Werner's website donation page and he reached his funding goal of $137,000. In addition, Facebook and the online payment processor Stripe each pledged to donate $50,000 a year to Koch's project.
Despite myriad health information standards and a landmark law to protect patient privacy, it appears insurance giant Anthem (ANTM) didn't encrypt personal data of 80 million of its customers, according to several news reports.
Britain's security services have acknowledged they have the worldwide capability to bypass the growing use of encryption by internet companies by attacking the computers themselves.
Whenever the terrorist threat is increased, as it has been since the tragic events in Paris last week, so too are the calls from politicians to increase the powers of the people they employ to protect the public from such threats.
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