Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Go International

A few quick notes from the MOOC front.…

The first major providers of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs) got their start in Sil­i­con Val­ley, Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts and Cana­da. Now we’re see­ing them sprout up out­side of the Unit­ed States. Take for exam­ple OpenLearning.com, a ven­ture born out of the Uni­ver­si­ty of New South Wales (UNSW) in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia. Start­ing this week, you can begin tak­ing two of their cours­es (Observ­ing and Analysing Per­for­mance in Sport & Ser­vices Mar­ket­ing – The Next Lev­el). Or you can check into a 12-week course that recent­ly got under­way: UNSW Com­put­ing 1.

Mean­while, if you can exer­cise a lit­tle patience, you can even­tu­al­ly start tak­ing class­es with the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Aus­tralia. By next March, the Perth-based uni­ver­si­ty plans to offer two cours­es (one in soci­ol­o­gy, the oth­er in oceanog­ra­phy) using an adapt­ed ver­sion of Stan­ford’s open source plat­form, Class2Go. The cours­es will be deliv­ered over mobile phones.

Final­ly, if you’re look­ing to learn a new lan­guage, why not try Span­ish­Mooc? It’s billed as “the first open online Span­ish course for every­one.” And it’s seem­ing­ly run as an inde­pen­dent project not asso­ci­at­ed with an exist­ing uni­ver­si­ty. The 12-week course will start on Jan­u­ary 21, 2013.

For a com­plete list of MOOCs, vis­it our col­lec­tion of 130 Free Online Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties.