MOOCs Changing the Way We Think About Higher Education - Helen Hu, Dive

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. http://diverseeducation.com/article/52317/#