Studying Teaching and Learning

Over the past several months, dozens of universities, including the University of Texas System, Brown and Wesleyan, have joined the bandwagon, working with MOOC providers to offer free online courses to anyone with an Internet connection.

Last week, the American Council on Education, an association for higher education presidents, raised the possibility that such courses could count toward a degree when it said it would review several to determine whether they ought to be eligible for transfer credit.

If you're a student looking for supplemental education, learn how you can find affordable options online.

The internet revolution has moved to education as top universities worldwide rush to put free courses online, setting up so-called massive open online courses or MOOCs. Higher education’s traditional business model is under threat as learning from the world’s most prestigious academic experts is available to anybody with a computer and broadband access.

Two top Australian universities, Melbourne and Queensland, have joined in. The University of Melbourne announced last Wednesday its partnership with Coursera, a leading US-based provider of free online university courses. The University of Queensland will shortly announce a partnership with Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) office of educational innovation and technology to use MOOC courses to both offer free courses to the public online and simultaneously its educational offering to on-campus students.

In late September, as workers applied joint compound to new office walls, hoodie-clad colleagues who had just met were working together on deadline. Film editors, code-writing interns and “edX fellows” — grad students and postdocs versed in online education — were translating videotaped lectures into MOOCs, or massive open online courses. As if anyone needed reminding, a row of aqua Post-its gave the dates the courses would “go live.”

The paint is barely dry, yet edX, the nonprofit start-up from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has 370,000 students this fall in its first official courses. That’s nothing. Coursera, founded just last January, has reached more than 1.7 million — growing “faster than Facebook,” boasts Andrew Ng, on leave from Stanford to run his for-profit MOOC provider.

“This has caught all of us by surprise,” says David Stavens, who formed a company called Udacity with Sebastian Thrun and Michael Sokolsky after more than 150,000 signed up for Dr. Thrun’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” last fall, starting the revolution that has higher education gasping. A year ago, he marvels, “we were three guys in Sebastian’s living room and now we have 40 employees full time.”