Giving Compass' Take:

Jeffrey Young takes a deeper look into the world of MOOCs (massive open online courses) to find that colleges and universities are driving innovation in learning, developing teacher skills and engaging with students by using these platforms for higher education.

Will MOOCs actually become the future of learning? What will happen to professors if this becomes the case and how will this shape the art of teaching?

Read about how the new online privacy laws will affect MOOCs.


There isn’t a New York Times bestseller list for online courses, but perhaps there should be. After all, so-called MOOCs, or massive open online courses, were meant to open education to as many learners as possible, and in many ways they are more like books (digital ones, packed with videos and interactive quizzes) than courses.

The colleges and companies offering MOOCs can be pretty guarded these days about releasing specific numbers on how many people enroll or pay for a “verified certificate” or microcredential showing they took the course. But both Coursera and EdX, two of the largest providers, do release lists of their most popular courses. And those lists offer a telling snapshot of how MOOCs are evolving and what their impact is on the instructors and institutions offering them.

Like bestsellers, some of these courses are bringing in serious money. When hundreds of thousands of people sign up for a course and tens of thousands of those pay a fee for a certificate, that adds up.

These courses also take advantage of the online medium more fully than courses on other subjects, since many allow students to upload coding projects that are then automatically graded. In other words, students aren’t just passively watching videos—they’re doing projects, and they get instant feedback from the software.

Once the videos for a MOOC have been recorded and the interactive quizzes built, universities can run the online courses again, again and again. And they do. But the big-name professors seen in the videos often have little to do with course reruns. Instead, colleges and universities hire instructors to keep things going.

Read the full article about MOOCs by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge