Giving Compass' Take:

• The author discusses how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are setting the path forward for advancing online education.

• How can education donors support the expansion of tech in the classroom?

• Read more about how MOOCs have impacted student learning.

From AI-driven personalized learning to virtual reality, online courses will need to innovate to address their credibility issues and fulfill their enormous promise

There’s little doubt that online courses are proving popular with students all over the world. Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers such as EdX and Futurelearn have been lauded with democratizing higher education and making knowledge more accessible.

The growth in online degrees is also being powered by greater digital connectivity in emerging markets such as Nigeria as well as a demand for flexible working and learning in developed economies like the US, Hong Kong and Singapore. But as fantastic as our access to knowledge these days would seem to those born a couple of generations before, it will likely pale in comparison to the next wave of immersive technology.

Looking to the not-too-distant future, we can already envisage how Virtual and Mixed Reality technologies will increasingly be incorporated into the online learning strategy of major Universities institutions help to make such distance courses more immersive and engaging, blending the real and virtual world seamlessly and thus vastly increasing our ability to learn.

Read the full article about MOOCs by Alice Bonasio at The Next Web.