4 Start-Ups Are Offering Free Online Courses - Wired Campus. The market for free online courses is growing every week, with new companies emerging to offer open courses to anyone who wants them.
Some of them have forgone the support of traditional institutions to try the for-profit waters instead. For anyone who might be struggling to keep track of the ever-growing field—the companies’ names can sound similar or stretch the bounds of the dictionary—below are four recently created start-ups challenging the traditional degree model with their free online courses: Udacity: The free education platform that grew out of Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s huge artificial-intelligence course has its own plans to expand.
When Udacity appeared a few weeks ago, two courses—one on building a search engine and the other on programming a robotic car—were in the works. They start on February 20 and will last seven weeks. Know of other new free-course providers? [Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by DeclanTM] Return to Top. Coursera. Udacity - 21st Century University. Iversity. Why Do Students Enroll in (But Don’t Complete) MOOC Courses?
Teaching Strategies Udacity office in Silicon Valley, ground zero for MOOCs.
Less than 10 percent of MOOC students, on average, complete a course. That’s the conclusion of Katy Jordan of Open University, who published her analysis, pulled together from available data of some Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. But do completion rates matter? It’s not that course completion rates don’t inform observers about the nature of MOOCs, said Michelle Rhee-Weise, who follows higher-ed developments in online and blended learning as an education senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation (formerly Innosight Institute). Among those reasons: 1. The analysis, which Jordan has continued to update since initially posting it in the middle of February, currently considers the enrollment and completion rate data of 24 MOOCs in all, including 20 offered from different universities over the Coursera platform.
THE FUTURE OF MOOCs? Related. MOOCs. MOOCS & Open Ed. Teaching and Learning. Open Education. Education. MOOC. About. Tufts Open Coureware. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health-OpenCourseWare. Khan Academy. MITx, Khan Academy, and Online Education Are No Substitute for In-School Learning. "You dropped 150 grand on an education that you could've had for a dollar-fifty in late charges at the public library.
" "Yeah, but I will have a degree. And you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip. " While the characters in Good Will Hunting aren't discussing it, their conversation can shed some light on the current fervor over online education. These new initiatives will be more like public libraries than universities. They may come cheap — likely more than $1.50 in late charges — but those of us who aren't geniuses will still be sitting in lecture halls and discussion sections. MIT recently launched MITx: the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, in their own words "an initiative to offer exciting, challenging and enriching courses to anyone, anywhere, who has the motivation and ability to engage MIT’s educational content.
" Many stakeholders in higher education and the media are getting excited. Source and Fulltext Available At [ OpenUW Free Courses.