MOOCs On The Move From Colleges To Companies

Donna Wells | Wired | July 19, 2013

If you’re one of the 1,000 lucky people worldwide who are: 1. Accepted to Harvard; 2. Successful in scoring a seat in Professor Michael Sandel’s wildly popular Justice course there; and 3. Wealthy enough to pay the $7,500 in tuition that it effectively costs you … Congratulations!

But if not, and you have a burning desire to debate the significant moral and ethical questions of our time, you need not despair. Professor Sandel began posting his lectures for free to iTunes last fall. In the nine months since, his courses have had more than 12 million views. In December, he hosted a live simulcast lecture — including 500 people from around the world — in a lively, real-time global classroom discussion. And this is just one of hundreds of headline-grabbing experiments in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) happening in higher education today, driven by innovation from companies like Coursera, Udacity, and edX, What’s less often covered, but just as groundbreaking, is that the same revolution is happening in corporate education….and for the same reasons.