Hack Education Weekly News: The MOOC Backlash Backlash

By Audrey Watters. MOOCs Insist "We're Not Dead Yet!"
The Techcrunch headline: “Its Audacity Undiminished, Udacity Raises $35 Million To Train A New Generation of Developers.” The new round of funding is from “the German media giant Bertelsmann, Japanese staffing company Recruit, Brazilian investment firm Valor Capital Group, and American cable and media company Cox Enterprises, also joined as new investors. Previous backers Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Peter Levine, and George Zachary also participated in the financing.” The startup has now raised at least $55 million. Founder Sebastian Thrun has quit his job at Google X, prompting a question typed, I presume, with a serious face: “Can Google X’s recently departed founder save the MOOC?”
Andreessen-Horowitz, again one of the investors in Udacity, has its first “Distinguished Visiting Professor of Computer Science,” Stanford’s Vijay Pande. Not surprisingly, he has thoughts on MOOCs. I mean, who doesn’t.
Not to be left out of the news cycle: “Why Free Online Classes Are Still the Future of Education,” featuring edX’s Anant Agarwal.
Via Inside Higher Ed: “The massive open online course provider Coursera is taking a more active role in shaping the content produced by its university partners. In an email to universities creating content for Coursera, the MOOC provider is asking for volunteers to create career-focused Specializations.”
Coursera has moved from MySQL to Cassandra because its data is so big. More...