"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." -- About Google Google is the most powerful nonhuman teacher ever known to actual humans.

Ray Schroeder, University of Illinois Springfield

In case the quotes didn't clue you in, this post doesn't argue against massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the ones offered by Udacity, Coursera, and edX. I think they are very worthy ventures and will serve to progress our system of higher education.

I've recently started yet another MOOC. This time it's Coursera's Statistics One. It's early days yet (I'm only on lecture two), but there are some interesting contrasts with another statistics MOOC I recently did, Udacity's ST101 Introduction to Statistics. The Coursera offering consists of videos, typically about fifteen to twenty minutes long and totalling around...

Massively open education models have been in the news recently (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18518508). One of the new organisations behind the story is Coursera (see www.coursera.org). On 2 July 2012 we were fortunate to welcome Professor Daphne Koller from Stanford University, a co-founder of Coursera, to the University of London for a talk about "The Online Revolution: Education ......

In the summer of 2012 the team of teachers and researchers associated with the MSc in E-learning programme at the University of Edinburgh began developing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for the Coursera platform.