A new wave of massive open online courses is evolving at a dramatic pace — and unleashing some soul-searching about higher education along the way.
These MOOCs were pioneered in Canada by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. They gained popularity not even two years ago in the U.S. after a free online course in artificial intelligence given by Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun was swamped with students.
Thrun and others began launching MOOC ventures offering courses in science, math, humanities and other subjects taught by professors at major universities, including elite ones. People around the world signed up, sometimes in the tens of thousands — even more than 100,000 — for an individual course.
Using technology to quiz students and stimulate interaction among them on a vast scale, Coursera, Udacity and edX, the three primary MOOC ventures, suddenly seemed to point the way to a new era of learning.
MOOCs began to grab the attention of many policymakers, not just educators, as a potentially effective but less expensive way to teach a big audience.
Online education has been around for decades at many universities. For-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix started online programs as early as the 1980s. But these new MOOC ventures sparked huge interest because of prestigious names such as Stanford, Harvard and MIT, the sheer numbers and diversity of their enrollment, newer technology and the fact they offer courses for free, educators say.
They came on the scene amid a continuing economic recession and climbing tuition rates.
