Another Look at Massive Online Open Courses

From the creator

This is the VOA Special English Education Report from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish A class with tens or even hundreds of thousands of students might sound like a teacher's bad dream. But a big idea in higher education these days is the massive open online course, or MOOC. Some universities offer free, non-credit MOOCs available to anyone in the world. Others charge for courses and provide credits. The idea is still developing. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently started its first MOOC. The school plans to offer many free, non-credit courses through a project called MITx. So far, most massive open online courses are in computer science, technology, mechanics and engineering. For example, students around the world are taking a free course called "Building a Computer Search Engine." Two computer scientists, Sebastian Thrun and David Evans, are offering this course through udacity.com. Mr. Evans is on leave from the University of Virginia. Mr. Thrun is a Stanford research professor and a Google Fellow best known for his work on a driverless car. For six weeks, the students watch short videos and then take informal quizzes. Mr. Evans says the quizzes are part of the lecture to keep students engaged and keep them thinking. The quizzes are not graded and students can try them as often as they want, whenever they want. They can also watch the videos repeatedly. Students receive homework and join online groups to exchange que

Published 2012-04-16 · Watch on YouTube ↗
Availability and playback restrictions are controlled by the original channel.