MOOCs - those massive open online courses - have made a big splash in terms of hype - and things only got bigger with Google's efforts to enter into this arena. I was asked to do a news piece for Information Today's NewsBreaks and you can read it here. The involvement of Apple, Google and other big Cloud Service providers is a natural given their provision of the massive storage that would be required if these systems take off - and imagine what they could make from algorithms applied to all this metadata!
So far, MOOCs seem less than perfect and only mildly popular. However, they do push institutions into moving more content to the web and moving away from both traditional classroom teachings modalities and the use of expensive textbooks - which is a move in the right direction.
Mark Yudof, former President of the University of Minnesota, Texas and California university systems, has frequently spoken of the fact that physical universities have reached the end of growth and that online resources, libraries and classrooms are the only way to expand their bases and increase revenues. Is this the future? I'm not convinced....unless we are moving into some type of retro Dark Age instead of a bright New World.
Your thoughts?
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