Professors: MOOCs great but not ready for primetime
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new survey of 103 professors of massive online open courses, or MOOCs, the free online courses offered through sites like Udacity and Coursera. Perhaps unsurprisingly given that those being surveyed are the early adopters of the MOOCs idea, they’re generally bullish on the potential of online courses to ...
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new survey of 103 professors of massive online open courses, or MOOCs, the free online courses offered through sites like Udacity and Coursera. Perhaps unsurprisingly given that those being surveyed are the early adopters of the MOOCs idea, they're generally bullish on the potential of online courses to bring down the costs of higher education and supplement live courses, but the majority still don't think their universites will -- or should -- offer formal credit for the courses.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new survey of 103 professors of massive online open courses, or MOOCs, the free online courses offered through sites like Udacity and Coursera. Perhaps unsurprisingly given that those being surveyed are the early adopters of the MOOCs idea, they’re generally bullish on the potential of online courses to bring down the costs of higher education and supplement live courses, but the majority still don’t think their universites will — or should — offer formal credit for the courses.
In other MOOCs news, the non-profit online education start-up Edx has introduced new artificial intelligence software to grade essays and written responses, though I imagine it’s still going to be a while until professors trust computers to grade anything longer than one or two sentence answer, or students take those grades very seriously.
FP‘s Ty McCormick and Elias Groll looked at the rise of the MOOCs last November.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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