Learning from MOOCs

By Audrey Watters

MOOCs. They’re all the rage these days, it seems — so much so I’d make them an early pick for one of the major ed-tech (startup) trends for 2012. Of course, describing MOOCs as an “ed-tech startup trend” and associating it with 2012 overlooks the history of Massive Open Online Courses that’s not associated with Silicon Valley startups — heck, that’s not associated with Silicon Valley at all.

But it’s the story of the “success” of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence class last fall that seems to dominate the mainstream narrative surrounding MOOCs. The 160,000 students that enrolled in Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun’s class was certainly a watershed moment — most of all for Thrun, who announced at the DLD conference in Munich that he couldn’t go back to teaching at Stanford and was founding his own online education startup, Udacity.

The “this changes everything!” excitement about MOOCs is echoed in the media, no doubt.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hack-higher-education/learning-moocs#ixzz1pEHdI6ya