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here's an edu startup that contains 14 MOOCs, massive open online courses. It's one of the first that got set up by Stanford University. One popular free course in computer science had 94,000 students when it ran the first time. Not all of them continued or finished but recenty, Colorado University announced that its global online campus would accept transfer credits towards a bachelor's degree if the students could pass a proctored final exam. Welcome to the crowdsourced future of higher education.

XKCD's map of online communities (source: social activity on various social networks gathered over spring & summer 2010)

XKCD's map of online communities (2007) (Note the size of size of MySpace in this 2007 version as compared to the size of Facebook in the 2010 version at http://xkcd.com/802/ )

Virtual world devoted to science, technology and free educational games online

I thought I'd post a few of the MOOC's that are getting notice now. I also just saw Candice's diigo bookmark which discussion some of them.

Savage Minds is a collective web log devoted to both bringing anthropology to a wider audience as well as providing an online forum for discussing the latest developments in the field. We are a group of Ph.D. students and professors teaching and studying anthropology and are excited to share it with you. Savage Minds was founded in 2005 and has been going strong ever since. In 2006 Nature ranked Savage Minds 17th out of the 50 top science blogs across all scientific disciplines. In 2010, American Anthropologist has called Savage Minds "the central online site of the North American anthropological community" whose "value is found in the quality of the posts by the site's central contributors, a cadre of bright, engaged, young anthropology professors." The title of our blog comes from Lévi-Strauss's book Pensée Sauvage. And yes: that is a pansy on the mast head.

The University of the People may actually be the very first edu MOOC in higher ed. Not certain but it has been developing for 4 years - I remember listening to podcasts of the founder talking at Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Even then, the concept of a massive open course was intriguing