Masculine Open Online Courses

By Carl Straumsheim. Despite the talk about how massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will dramatically alter the landscape of higher education, the courses have in some ways taken academe back -- to the days of huge gender gaps, when senior scholars overwhelmingly were men. An unofficial count by Inside Higher Ed shows 8 of the 63 courses listed on edX’s website are taught by women, and an additional 8 are taught by mixed-gender groups. Of Coursera’s 432 courses, 121 feature at least one female instructor and 71 taught exclusively by them. Udacity lists 29 courses on its website, and while only two are taught by women, many of them were created by female course developers. Read more...