Massively Open Online Courses Technical Description
Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online classes intended to reach a worldwide audience. These are individual courses ranging from high school to graduate level, in a spectrum of subjects that range from art history to data mining. MOOCs share two key features, one being they are through an online medium, and the other being free and open for anyone to sign up.
The tipping point crossed early last year when the three largest MOOC platforms, Coursera, EdX and Udacity, exited beta and publically launched. These platforms make it extremely easy for professors to move online by providing infrastructure to create video lectures, quizzes, tests and homeworks. It only took a couple of big-name, early adopters like UC Berkeley, MIT, U of Michigan, and Stanford to create a huge amount of buzz. Now Coursera is home to over 100 courses from over 20 universities. Almost all the Ivy leagues are on board and great institutions all over the world are joining in on the initiative.
For students the process is even better than signing up for classes at Georgia Tech. You are free to join as many classes as you want. The classes are fully structured, with homeworks, quizzes and tests. There are forums to interact other students, on which you can also frequently find study groups if you live in a city. These classes are transforming education in the United States and all over the world. The way that MOOCs can revolutionize education is through it’s huge audience and collection of data. Due to the massive user-base, professors can team up with data analysts to run A/B tests on specific questions and teaching methods that cannot be done in a traditional classroom. At this point, like many other tech companies leveraging big data, they have so much data and not enough people using it. In this way EdX, a joint venture by MIT and Harvard, will be releasing some of it’s data to the public to have a crack at it. Hopefully individuals will take advantage of this opportunity to come up with some new insights on education.
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