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Did they jump or were they pushed?

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.

A A Clay Christensen literally wrote the book on disruption, so it's worth paying attention to him when he talks about where the disruption fueled by the web is going to strike next.

Scott Young, a recent university graduate, writer, programmer, traveler and avid reader of interesting things, decided to finish MIT's entire 4-year computer science program within 12 months with MIT OpenCourseWare.

Sorting out policy or glitz and glamour?

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...

The issue

HGSET561

This is a really interesting article, and coupled with the edX / Anant Agarwal article below from Douglas, I think it brings up additional questions. Even with all the features that Anant says will be added to edX, I feel like they are all just part of the "convenience" factor and in many cases (like grading, discussion forum), more convenience for the teaching staff than the students. It is convenient for the students to do online labwork instead of going to a physical lab, for example. So I wonder if that type of convenience is enough to convince more students to sign up to MOOCs, or if they have to fundamentally change to add more types of value?

Gates funds edX to bring their courses/content to the community college setting. Is K-12 next?

Interesting point Harvey - thanks for weighing in! Per Clay Christensen, disruptive innovators often target the least desirable/most under-served segment of the market upon entry - the business that the established folks don't bother to pursue (think Southwest Airlines, etc). They then evolve up the value chain, ultimately displacing the large, established guys.

Chip, that's what makes this especially curious: it's the major players (Harvard, MIT, etc.) who are pursuing the least-served part of the market here - Christensen would argue that they are more like to pursue sustaining, not disruptive innovation! In essence, EdX is seeking to disrupt the teaching of entry-level, profit-generating classes at other schools, while possibly undermining their own teaching of the same topics. Should be interesting to see how it plays out.

Minnesota reverses decision to ban Coursera after "a staggering amount of backlash" 

Interview with Stanford's first vice provost of online learning

Someone else over the weekend posted about the U of Wisconsin accepting edX courses as transfer credit--found this other article that a university in Colorado is also going to accept Udacity credit!

Google enters the MOOC market..

The new format adds integrated online classroom forums for MOOCs. You can check out Stanford's site here: http://class2go.stanford.edu/

A major competitor to the Harvard-MIT-Berkeley Edx consortium

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).

General discussion of the benefits of MOOCs and the growing dissatisfaction with the state of college education.

UT-Austin professors pilot "Synchronous Massive Online Class" (SMOC)