From the NEW YORK TIMES:
…Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but not credit.
But 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…
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…
Click here to read the full article.
EDITOR: Let’s hope this is the harbinger or total university reform. Who needs a dipoloma from Harvard, Penn or MIT if he/she have passed all the courses with flying colors? Suddenly, the world wide playing field is about to be leveled. Furthermore, students won’t have to graduate owing in the six figures.
As we have said in the past, we would welcome the first undergraduate year being spent on campus and future years taught via Internet, lab work done locally, and students only returning a few weeks annually
