Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Investors in Coursera, the world’s largest massive open online course (MOOC) provider are confident the company will arrive at a sustainable business model, says its co-founder, Daphne Koller. Ms Koller, who set up Coursera last year with fellow Stanford IT professor Andrew Ng, now offers more than 400 free online courses from 84 partners which are mainly universities, Financial Review reports. In little over a year, 4.3 million students have enrolled. … Speaking to a largely academic audience, he said that the uncertainty with which MOOCs were viewed by some was the same uncertainly with which people in retail once viewed Amazon. “Amazon now has revenues greater than Woolworths in this country,” he said. Mr Koller said that, although there were currently many competitors in the MOOC market, she thought it would tend toward being winner take all. “Right now, we’re four times larger than anybody else in terms of students, 10 times larger than anybody else in terms of courses,” she said.

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Coursera is a for-profit company that has joined with top universities to deliver free online courses. The “free” part sounds great until we realize the real intent of companies like Coursera is to transition into producing monetized, for-credit university courses, Irene Ogrizek, an English literature teacher, writes. To many academics this represents a conflict of interest that compromises the independence and integrity of higher education institutions. … The corporate world has other tentacles in education and the portal that’s granting them the most access these days is technology. In Benda’s terms, the current “realism” being foisted on academics is the idea that online distance-learning, in the form of massive online open courses (MOOCs), must be implemented to save cash-strapped institutions. The idea is being flogged by corporations looking to expand their markets and has found support among co-opted academics willing to help them. These are academics, like Lynch, who have made Faustian bargains in return for the glory of heading institutions operating in the black. … The incursion of the corporate world into education makes sense when we consider that declining disposable incomes are depriving businesses of the spenders they need to stay profitable. If people aren’t buying the goods and services that keep economies afloat then how can corporations survive?

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One million and counting. That’s the number of open online learning course enrollments Penn reached this month, less than a year after the University offered the first classes with the online learning platform Coursera, the Penn Current reports. Penn is one of the founding partners and board members of Coursera, which offers free, open-access, non-credit classes to anyone with a computer. To date, 15 Penn professors from the schools of Medicine, Arts & Sciences, Engineering and Applied Science, and Wharton have shared their knowledge with students from 162 countries around the world. Additional courses will open this summer and fall, including classes from the schools of Design, Law, and Nursing, with 23 faculty members participating. Deirdre Woods, interim executive director of Penn’s Open Learning Initiative, says the 1 million enrollments equates to about 500,000-600,000 students, since many enrollees have signed up for more than one course.

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