Harvard and M.I.T. Offer Free Online Courses - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite universities planning to offer free massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.
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The technology for online education, with video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.
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M.I.T. and Harvard officials said they would use the new online platform not just to build a global community of online learners, but also to research teaching methods and technologies.
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if I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course.”
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The edX project will include not only engineering courses, in which computer grading is relatively simple, but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software. Coursera will also offer free humanities courses in which grading will be done by peers.
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“What faculty don’t want to do is just take something off the shelf that’s somebody else’s and teach it, any more than they would take a textbook, start on Page 1, and end with the last chapter,” he said. “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.”
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I think that Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, UP, and Michigan have a great idea in establishing these free online courses. When such high level courses are provided online and for free, there really is no excuse not to pursue greater knowledge. The only ingredient not provided is self-motivation. After both sites, Coursera seems to be developing much more rapidly then edX. Coursera is constantly updating their site with new courses. Also, after sifting through a few of the courses offered, I noticed that many teachers are willing to stream some online students in through video conferencing. These online students can virtually interact with their counterparts in the classroom at the given elite university. In other words, the intimate relationship found through interacting with other students and professors in a classroom setting is not completely lost.