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MOOCs Find Their Audience: Professional Learners and Universities

Edsurge

In Oct 2011, a few Stanford professors offered three online courses which were completely free. The media started calling this space MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses, a term coopted from a 2008 experiment. The narrative in early days of MOOC space was around disruption of universities.

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MOOCs are No Longer Massive. And They Serve Different Audiences Than First Imagined.

Edsurge

MOOCs have gone from a buzzword to a punchline, especially among professors who were skeptical of these “massive open online courses” in the first place. MOOCs started in around 2011 when a few Stanford professors put their courses online and made them available to anyone who wanted to take them. And that's what MOOCS have.

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MOOCs Started Out Completely Free. Where Are They Now?

Edsurge

I took one of the very first MOOCs, and back then the videos, assignments, and certificates were all free. That was in 2011. As MOOC providers focussed on finding a business model, they started putting certain aspects of the experience behind a paywall, hoping to get more people to pay. It probably won’t be part of free courses.

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A Proposal to Put the ‘M’ Back in MOOCs

Edsurge

MOOCs have evolved over the past five years from a virtual version of a classroom course to an experience that feels more like a Netflix library of teaching videos. These days, most MOOC providers let learners start courses whenever they like (or on a bi-weekly or monthly basis, as Coursera does). But it doesn’t have to be that way.

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The Second Wave of MOOC Hype is Here, and it’s Online Degrees

Edsurge

In the past year or so there's been a flurry of announcements from the big MOOC providers involving new degree programs based around their online courses. Earlier this year, for instance, Coursera announced six new degrees , including the first-ever MOOC-based Bachelors. Quite the opposite.

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Monetization Over Massiveness: Breaking Down MOOCs by the Numbers in 2016

Edsurge

The modern massive open online course movement, which began when the first “MOOCs” were offered by Stanford professors in late 2011, is now half a decade old. In that time, MOOC providers have raised over $400 million and now employ more than a thousand staff. Class Central. million Udacity - 4 million.

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Online Learning's 'Greatest Hits'

Edsurge

MOOCs Recent virtual upstarts, MOOCs—massive open online courses—catapulted onto the global learning stage when Stanford University computer scientists Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig in 2011 came upon the bright idea of streaming their robotics lectures over the Internet. The term MOOC was coined by others in 2008.)