Gone are the days of going to class, making notes and spending hours in a library. Today you can do almost everything online – even relive your student days. MOOCs, or “massive open online courses”, have been around for a while now, but are still extremely popular – and for a reason.

A MOOC is an online course aimed at large scale, interactive participation and open access via the internet. In addition to traditional course material such as videos, reading and problem sets, a community is created for students and academics to interact be means of user forums.

Open, online courses are a fairly recent addition to the field of long distance education and offer a free or low cost alternative to conventional tertiary education – an option previously not freely available to all. Leading universities such as Stanford, MIT, Yale and Harvard offer MOOCs as part of their curriculum and these provide anyone the opportunity to study at a prominent academic institution.

MOOCs have no formal entry requirements or limits on students and millions of eager learners make use of this open platform.  Coursera, the current forerunner of MOOCs, claims they already have more than 3 million students.

If you’re interested in expanding your knowledge – whether it’s with something as random as a course on cryptography or a more practical one such as financial planning, have a look at the available courses on the websites below. You’re sure to find something that inspires you.

Also read MOOC News and Reviews’ extensive article on MOOCs, “What is a Massive Open Online Course Anyway?” and have a look at extensive TED talks also has an extensive list of talks on MOOCS.

MOOC-COURSES

https://www.coursera.org/
http://www.saylor.org
http://www.futurelearn.com
http://www.mooc-list.com/
http://www.class-central.com/
http://www.educause.edu/library/massive-open-online-course-mooc

[SOURCE: www.wikipedia.org]

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2015 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Connectivity, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.