Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge interviews Dhawal Shah, founder and CEO of Class Central, who argues that MOOCs still have an impact on students but only those who are focusing specifically on receiving a MOOC based degree. 

• What are some of the reasons that MOOCs do not peak student interest anymore? Why are they less relevant/effective now than in 2012?

• Read about the opportunities that MOOCs provide for both students and educators. 


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. But what is their legacy on campuses?

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. The crowds who showed up were, well, massive. We’re talking 160,000 people signing up to study advanced tech topics like data science.

The New York Times later declared 2012 as the ‘year of the MOOC,’ and columnists said the virtual courses would bring a revolution.  But in the rush of public interest that followed, skeptics wondered whether online courses could help fix the cost crisis of higher education. Was this the answer to one of the nation’s toughest problems? The answer, it turns out, is, no. Actually these days you don’t hear much about MOOCs at all.

Dhawal Shah, founder and CEO of Class Central, has been tracking MOOCs closely and steadily ever since he was a student in one of those first Stanford open courses. Shah is our podcast guest this week, and he argues that MOOCs are having an impact, but mainly for people who are enrolling in MOOC-based degrees, where they can get a credential that can help them in their careers without having to go back to a campus.

Read the full interview with Dhawal Shah about MOOCs by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge