MOOCs Change Playing Field in Higher Education

By Richard Springer. The rapid spread of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, is transforming higher education in the U.S. and worldwide. U.S. universities and colleges are scrambling to formulate MOOC strategies, or risk being put on the defensive if they don’t have them.
Three MOOC providers are spearheading the MOOC proliferation: edX, a nonprofit launched by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard with initial pledges of $30 million each; and Udacity and Coursera, two for-profit MOOC course providers with links to Stanford University. Anant Agarwal, former director of MIT’s artificial intelligence lab and president of edX, told India-West in an exclusive interview that 2012 was “the year of disruption” for higher education in the U.S. Read more...