Friday, December 07, 2012

The Coming MOOC Wave


Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) may become the next big wave in education, exerting a long-term transformative effect on the economy:




This video gives an early picture of the MOOC, which is now currently evolving into more expert-controlled centralized repositories serving up online instruction in an increasing variety of topics. As some established academic institutions tentatively experiment in reaching out to form their own arrangements with online course offerings, in some cases they are even extending this into allowing accreditation through tests taken in proctored settings. This allows the students to pay for the test without paying the high cost of tuition for the course itself.

Ultimately, systems which offer the most choice and flexiblity will be the most responsive to market forces, and will thus be able to more quickly iterate into better forms which will only increase their appeal and dominance over time.

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