Interesting Article on LinkedIn about the Online Course Revolution

[Daithi]

Coursera is affiliated with top-tier universities that have the resources to get courses approved. Whether they will spend the money to do it is another question, but at least they did it for 5 courses and have announced they are planning to do more. Unfortunately, their first batch of approved courses weren't up my ally, represents a very small subset of the courses they offer. I'd like to see some of the artificial intelligence and other computer related courses get approval.

I also remember reading at the end of last year about Bill & Melinda Gates awarding ACE nearly a million dollars to look into approving MOOCs for credit. ACE formed a committee with the Presidents of various colleges that are members of ACE to start examining the issue. I remember thinking at the time that it wouldn't go anywhere, but then Coursera got their 5 courses approved, so who knows.

One sour note, the President of Excelsior College, John Ebersole, announced they would not be following the ACE recommendation to grant credit for the Coursera courses. I'm not sure why, after all I believe they accept Straighterline. Maybe Bioelectricity at Duke and Calculus at Penn don't meet the level of rigor demanded by Excelsior.