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VSee is a high quality video conference tool compared to skype and google hangout. It's good for video conference, pen annotation and file sharing.

This article links to the contract between Coursera and the University of Michigan, mentioning the monetization possibilities, among others. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/400864-coursera-fully-executed-agreement.html#document/p40

MOOCs and their shorsightedness.

A good description of Udacity & Coursera. Says MOOCs work well for students who are self-motivated and already fairly well educated. Yet, worldwide, the poorest students still don't have the background (or the Internet bandwidth) to participate in a major way. It suggests that very selective colleges will continue to thrive, but those in the middle will need to work harder to justify their costs.

Invoking a decades old law that requires any degree granting academic institution to obtain a license to operate in state (and pay a hefty fee for said license), Minnesota has banned universities from offering free online courses through education site Coursera, prompting the site to issue this notice to all Minnesota users: Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so.

Pretty interesting insights. I think the vision matches what most people think of, though I'm not convinced by her talk that it's fundamentally different from the Open Universities or U of Phoenix (except that it's free and put on by top "brick-and-mortar" universities).

A step forward in comprehensive online ed, and also an example of "mashing up" existing offerings by a third party. This guy "thought it would be an interesting exercise to see if it was possible to design a reasonable computer science curriculum using just Coursera courses (a MOOC)."

I think that's a really interesting exercise--especially the one comment about "you could take all these in about six months." Thanks for the link!

"Although Coursera's founders have presented their MOOCs as a way to democratize higher education by making it available online, free, to anyone in the world, the Penn survey found that in the United States and developing countries alike, most Coursera students were well educated, employed, young and male."

FYI, I went to Penn last year and was aware of this type of survey. Apparently, if you have a chance to look into their methodology, then they probably select a far larger number of Penn alumni than a representative portion. Considering that many Penn alumni love the idea of taking classes for free at their Alma Mater, I feel a bit skeptical about that reported unusually high percentage of bachelor's degree holders.

I think that this makes a lot of sense. You have to be very self-motivated with a desire to learn AND have the online resources and time to take a MOOC. That's a lot - and I would guess that people who are highly educated tend to be self-motivated. And then young men probably have more time than working parents. There's a lot of constraining factors despite the 'openness' of a MOOC.

Wow, pretty interesting that Coursera is getting into this game. I always thought that was a strong suit of Udacity and one possible way for them to get sustainable revenue.

TED talk on Coursera . If you haven't seen it, its a well constructed case in favor of the platform. Perhaps remedial for our understanding, but useful for dissemination of understanding this technology.

sorry, i looked back and saw that this has already been posted.

Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor's degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.

Thank you for posting - this is fascinating. This is not only a threat to Blackboard, but also the MOOC companies (Coursera, Udacity, etc.). If the tool continues to be developed in terms of functionality and ease of use, AND third party developers build out applications that plug into this platform, then colleges and universities will start to build their own online courses, and not farm out their content to the Coursera's of the world... This reminds of the dot com era (circa 2000) when companies large and small hired "web development" firms to create websites for them. Now companies largely do this themselves...

Thanks for sharing Mohit. It's great that it's open source and allows teachers all over the world to build their own courses. I wonder what this would do to the larger online course companies...

Minnesota government uses a decades-old law to ban online classes, then reconsiders after public outrage.