A MOOC of Our Own

By Lynn Sutton. Massive, open, online courses (MOOCs) have dominated the conversation in higher education since their sudden arrival in spring 2012. Building upon the enrollment of more than 100,000 students in open courses offered by Stanford University, companies such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX were launched with the goal of offering free, open, academic courses, taught by distinguished faculty to students all over the world. The MOOC movement is evidence of the profoundly disruptive change that is widely seen as coming to higher education. The cost of a college degree is growing at an unsustainable rate. In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama put higher education on notice that this trend cannot continue. But what does this mean for academic libraries? More...