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Citing an internal report on edX, Inside Higher Ed said the school worried MOOCs could: Perpetuate an “information dispensing” model of teaching, which preferences lectures and exams over seminars and teacher-graded papers Take tuition dollars from middle-tier and lower-tier schools Lead to the centralization of higher education in the U.S. Exacerbate the star faculty system

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—SmartHistory: Raised $11,513 for a Web site created by two art historians. —Punk Mathematics: Raised 28,701 for a book of mathematical stories. —Open Educational Resources for Typography: Raised $13,088 to develop teaching materials for courses on typography. —Trade School: Raised $9,133 to run a program that turns storefronts into temporary trade schools. —Brooklyn Brainery: Raised $9,629 to set up a collaborative school whose courses would cost $25 for four weeks.

The first, called the "university self-service model," essentially allows a participating university to use edX's platform as a free learning-management system for a course on the condition that part of any revenue generated by the course flow to edX.

The organization charges a base rate of $250,000 for each new course, plus $50,000

EdX has a deal with Pearson VUE, a company that runs a worldwide network of testing centers, to hold proctored examinations for its MOOCs.

Coursera has done an incredibly effective job harnessing this Presidential passion for press. Coursera – ‘the platform for offering “open” courses’ – has been very noisy about the fact that they only work with prestigious universities. What school doesn’t want to join the Stanford / Tecnológico de Monterrey / Princeton / École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne club? For the cost of offering one class in a new format, a President can officially put his or her institution in the same category as these “prestigious” schools. What Board of Trustees doesn’t want that?

as Brown’s team has come to believe, it could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.

Still, Brown’s online development team is debating whether to offer a certificate of some kind to students who complete the course, which officials know would be used as yet another college application supplement.

Now, in what seems to be the first major effort by a university to tailor a massive open online course, or MOOC, specifically to high school students, Brown University is preparing to offer a free online engineering class with the aim of teaching high school students about the merits and challenges of the field.

Courses can also be deliberately designed as adaptive systems, in which learning emerges.  The MA in Management Learning and Leadership Programme (MAMLL) course at Lancaster University in the UK is an example in which the curriculum itself is emergent, although still within the quality assurance framework for master’s courses (this might have been more difficult in an undergraduate course).

Many professors teaching MOOCs had a similarly positive outlook: Asked whether they believe MOOCs "are worth the hype," 79 percent said yes.

Many of those surveyed felt that these free online courses should be integrated into the traditional system of credit and degrees. Two-thirds believe MOOCs will drive down the cost of earning a degree from their home institutions, and an overwhelming majority believe that the free online courses will make college less expensive in general.

John Owens was drawn to MOOCs because of their reach. He also did not want to be left behind.

Ellen N. Junn, provost and vice president for academic affairs at the university in San Jose, said the California State University System faces a crisis because more than 50 percent of entering students cannot meet basic requirements. “They graduate from high school, but they cannot pass our elementary math and English placement tests,” she said.

Recently edX completed a pilot offering of its difficult circuits and electronics course at San Jose State to stunning results: while 40 percent of the students in the traditional version of the class got a grade of C or lower, only 9 percent in the blended edX class got such a low grade.