By Charlotte Clarke. In 2012 Sharon Watkins was watching a Ted talk when she came across the concept of Moocs – massive open online courses. She was so impressed by the prospect of elite education being delivered for free to the masses, that she decided to set up a Mooc cohort where she works in Springfield, Ohio. More...

By Dan Simmons. By conventional education standards, UW-Madison’s first round of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, had an extremely rough start.
The interest was indeed massive, with more than 135,000 students worldwide signing up for the four classes rolled out last year, the school’s first dive into higher education’s new frontier. Read more...

By JD Solomon. Study finds MOOC student engagement varies widely from traditional offline courses Are you a viewer, solver or an all-rounder?
A team of researchers from Cornell Tech, Cornell University and Stanford University have released a study that provides the most comprehensive look to date at how students engage with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). With their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning, but very little is actually understood about how participants engage in these courses and how their success should be judged. The new study from Cornell and Stanford concludes that MOOCs serve very different goals than traditional courses, and students should be assessed accordingly, beyond just course completion and their grade. More...