During the past two months, two ventures offering free MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) have spun out of Stanford. One is Udacity run by Sebastian Thrun. And the other is Coursera, which announced a slew of big news today.
To start with, it raised $16 million in funding from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates.
Next it announced agreements to offer courses by Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan (in addition to Stanford).
And finally it has added humanities courses to its upcoming fall curriculum — a departure from the MOOC norm of only offering courses in computer science & engineering. Courses include:
- A History of the World since 1300 (Princeton)
- Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World (Michigan)
- Greek and Roman Mythology (Penn)
- Listening to World Music (Penn)
- Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (Penn)
The courses will get started in the Fall. In the meantime, don’t miss our collection of 450 Free Courses from top universities, including Stanford, MIT, Yale, Harvard, Oxford and beyond.
Oh. My. Goodness. A top-notch world-class education has just been redefined to the point of blowing major paradigms here!
What you do is great .
But 200,000,000 college age people of the world including USA college ages are after a degree to make living.
We have to find a model to award degrees from top schools , for the sake of quality , to online learners at a small fee. $ 10 per course .
Or better yet, we stop requiring prohibitively expensive, oft-empty degrees and start looking for skill-flex competencies in hiring processes instead.
TERI
1.- For sure we must stop prohibitively expensive, oft-empty degrees from unknown colleges without quality.
2.- Skill flex competencies can be gained from MITx + Harvardx certificate programs as well at a small fee from the top schools of the world, no worry about quality, all employers accept those skills verified by MITx and Harvardx and now UC Berkeley. Go to http://www.edx.org to register. This fall is free but probably next spring will have a fee of $ 10 , not bad.
I am against Coursera.
Can you imagine a business without a business plan .
They do not know how to finance the business yet.
It is simple
— Have million students, can they ?
— Be global, international.
— Charge only $ 10-20 per course
— Make million dollars every semester
I have another suggestion
Not everybody can go to MIT and Harvard programs, courses are very diffucult .
So Coursera should target students destinated for less competitive schools such as good but less competitive school,
Uni of Illinois, PennState, Uni of Michigan, Uni of Edinborogh and the like.
I am sure Coursera can find more students in this category .
But please only quality schools.
MITx + Harvardx targeted 1 billion in the world , Coursera must target for the second billion .
That is a must . ONLINE works only globally, with million students .