"That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with "nukes" seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs - led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors - are a new disruptive force in education. "
Infographic on online education providers that offer online courses - including ones that are free and well known such Coursera & Udacity as well as others that are less well known which charge subscription fees such as Benchprep and The Great Courses.
Schuman's piece deriding the Mooc movement based on Thrun's 'pivot'. It's crap journalism but it's the article getting all the comments. As an academic maybe she should read Hattie before bigging up her own contribution to learning.
"It was just 18 months ago that we were living in the "Year of the MOOC." Massive open online courses-MOOC for short-were supposed to revolutionize the way people learned and deliver high-quality education to the masses. But the idea faced a tough 2013. The co-founder of Udacity, an early pioneer in free online education, admitted that his company initially had a "lousy product," while studies showed that hardly any students were actually completing the courses offered by such services at all."
Excellent account by the excellent Audrey Watters on the really expensive, really disruptive conference populated by really rich and really cool people (well at least that's what they think when they look in the mirror).
Some thoughts on how Coursera might make money - and some insights into how they currently organise e.g. more than $1m per staff member in venture capital available.