Minnesota Gives Coursera the Boot, Citing a Decades-Old Law - Wired Campus. Coursera offers free, online courses to people around the world, but if you live in Minnesota, company officials are urging you to log off or head for the border.
The state’s Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there. It’s unclear how the law could be enforced when the content is freely available on the Web, but Coursera updated its Terms of Service to include the following caution: Notice for Minnesota Users:Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so.
But Ms. Grimes said the law the letters refer to isn’t new. Ms. >> What You Need to Know About MOOC’s Return to Top. Pitch Perfect, Seth MacFarlane, and higher education online: Slate’s Culture Gabfest weighs in. Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 212 with Al Filreis, Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below: And join the lively conversation on the Culturefest Facebook page here: Culturefest is on the radio!
“Gabfest Radio” combines Slate’s Culture and Political Gabfests in one show—listen on Saturdays at 7 a.m. and Sundays at 6 p.m. on WNYC’s AM 820. On this week’s Culturefest, our critics discuss the movie Pitch Perfect, wondering whether its wit and charm elevate it above the status of just another performance competition movie. The Gabfesters then discuss comedy kingpin Seth MacFarlane and ponder what it is about the world’s highest-paid television writer that makes his star continue to rise. Here are some links to the things we discussed this week: Julia’s pick: The fine art of cereal mixing, or putting cereal from two different boxes into one bowl. Outro: “Psychic TV” by The Orchids You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.
Online Education Grows Up, And For Now, It's Free. Hide captionCoursera founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller are computer science professors at Stanford University.
Jeff Chiu/AP Coursera founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller are computer science professors at Stanford University. Online education isn't particularly new. It has been around in some form since the 1990s, but what is new is the speed and scale in which online learning is growing. In barely a year, many of the most prestigious research universities in the world – including Stanford, Caltech, Oxford and Princeton — have started to jump onto the online bandwagon. Those universities now offer classes through consortiums like Coursera, a tech company that's partnered with more than 30 of the top universities in the world to offer online classes from its course catalogue — for free.
Earlier this year in Kazahkstan, 22-year-old computer science student Askhat Murzabayev had a problem. So Murzabayev went online to Coursera and enrolled in Stanford's Machine Learning class for free. Coursera.org. Consortium of Colleges Takes Online Education to New Level. Even before the expansion, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the founders of Coursera, said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.
Now, the partners will include the California Institute of Technology; Duke University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia, where the debate over online education was cited in last’s month’s ousting — quickly overturned — of its president, Teresa A.
Sullivan. Foreign partners include the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and EPF Lausanne, a technical university in Switzerland. And some of them will offer credit. “This is the tsunami,” said Richard A. So far, MOOCs have offered no credit, just a “statement of accomplishment” and a grade.