The Big Idea That Can Revolutionize Higher Education: 'MOOC' - Laura McKenna - Business. Massive open online courses combine the best of college -- exceptional instruction -- with the best of technology -- online interactive learning. Is this the future of efficient, effective education? Reuters In the historic sweep of technology, higher education stands apart as a bastion of old-fashioned thinking. But in anticipation that the information revolution is coming for colleges, Ivy League colleges are competing to create online classes without the Ivy League price tag and without the Ivy League admission hurdles. In a recent article in the New Yorker, the President of Stanford, John Hennessy said, "There's a tsunami coming.
" Daphne Koller, a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the co-founder of Coursera, a free online classroom, believes that Hennessy is right. Coursera is a massive online open classroom -- or MOOC -- that operates in conjunction with four top universities - Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Princeton.
Online courses could lead to big changes. Online education is getting a sudden burst of media attention. That’s because the two biggest brands in the business — Harvard and MIT — announced a multimillion-dollar program to deliver some courses online. And since these schools are widely admired, other colleges and universities are asking questions about what they should be doing with online learning. But this leads to a fundamental question: Why do people go to college? What’s all the online-education fuss about? Does this sound like an irresistible offer to you? So if pricing is a market signal, what message is the free edX sending out to consumers and suppliers of higher education? What Harvard and MIT and the other globally leading schools offer students are two priceless assets: branding and professional networks. And maybe this explains why some of the best are starting their own companies to commercialize the brands they have forged in top universities.
But programs like edX raise another question: Would CEOs like Mr. New Equation For Free Education: MITx + HARVARDx = edX. More private colleges offering tuition discounts | McClatchy Tribune News Service. WASHINGTON — The cost of a college education continues to increase faster than inflation; a phenomenon that's roiling family budgets and spurring calls for action on Capitol Hill. But with a little digging, parents and students can find cost-cutting deals and programs that make the paper chase a lot more affordable. While public colleges and universities are hiking tuition to make up for dramatic reductions to state higher-education funding, private colleges – which usually receive no state funding – have greater latitude to cut costs. That’s one reason that average annual tuition increases at public colleges have been more than twice as large as those at private colleges over the last decade, according to the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center.
As more students question whether to take on massive tuition debt only to end up with degrees but no jobs, many private colleges are offering discount deals that cut, freeze or even eliminate tuition altogether for incoming students. Harvard And MIT Join Forces To Become Juggernaut Of Free Online Education. Harvard and MIT join forces to bring the world education for free...in superhero fashion. Online education is witnessing its own Avengers-like uniting of superhero forces as Harvard University and MIT recently announced “edX”, a combined $60 million joint initiative to offer their college-level courses online for free.
Launching in the fall of 2012, edX is a not-for-profit organization formed by the two universities to bring each institution’s free online course offerings to a broader global audience. Courses will be delivered through the open source MITx platform in development to host courses that were previously part of the OpenCourseWare program. As with the MITx initiative, edX plans to issue certificates (possibly costing a small fee) to students for completing courses; however, course completion will not earn college credits at either institution and the certificates will be issued from edX, not through either university. Video streaming by Ustream. UNICEF and partners work to provide a free education for all Haiti's children. Top Schools from Berkeley to Yale Now Offer Free Online Courses. On average, it will cost $55,600 to attend Princeton, Penn, Michigan or Stanford next year. But now you can enroll in online courses at all four universities online for free.
The universities won't just be posting lectures online like MIT's OpenCourseWare project, Yale’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast. Rather, courses will require deadlines, evaluations, discussions and, in some cases, a statement of achievement. "The technology as well as the sociology have finally matured to the point where we are ready for this," says Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, the for-profit platform classes will run on. "This is a group that didn't grow up at a time when there weren't browsers," Koller adds. "They have the mental state that allows them to say, 'I'm willing to get a good portion of my education online.'" Koller and Ng are the second pair of Stanford professors attempting to scale the idea past Stanford.