You can enroll in some Duke University and Ivy League school classes for free. If I told you this, you probably would not believe me. Your opportunity to do this is available now thanks to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).
With advances in technology and companies like COURSERA (a for profit company out of Mountain View California), the number of MOOCs being offered is exploding. On last week, 24 additional universities (including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) announced they would be offering courses through Coursera. This new announcement brings the total to 62 universities offering classes in Coursera’s catalog.
Even though the number of MOOC offerings is exploding, there are questions that remain:
- How do you award credit to students?
- How do you prevent students from cheating?
- How do you make money from presenting the classes?
You are probably wondering why, with the cost of a college education going up every year, a university would be offering free online classes. In my opinion, MOOCs are a testing ground for ways to leverage the university’s top commodity. A university’s top commodity is their high profile professors. On last year, a single MOOC course on “Logic” offered by Duke University had an initial enrollment of over 180,000 people. While only about 17,000 were still active at the end, you can see the huge opportunity to make money once the “How do you” questions are answered. In addition, these universities have spent decades and in some cases centuries positioning their brick and mortar campuses as the best place to receive an education. They now want to extend this image into the digital cloud before upstart online universities carve this digital space from them.
If you want to take a course from Princeton or want to brush up on your “Statistical Molecular Thermodynamics”, you can through a MOOC. As you can see, you can take an array of different MOOC classes.
Which courses do you want to take?
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Author
Isaac is a Fee-Only (no products sold) Certified Financial Planner® Practitioner. Isaac founded Stalwart Financial Planning with offices in Fayetteville NC and Durham NC. Isaac provides comprehensive planning and investment management services to individuals from all walks of life. Isaac can be reached by phone at 910-867-8464, or by email (iallen@StalwartPlanning.com). Visit him at Stawart Financial Planning www.StalwartPlanning.com.