After a $4.3 million marketing effort to lure students from around the world to fork over tuition for online classes that were supposed to “knock people’s socks off,” the University of California has come up empty-handed. The classes (not to be confused with online offerings to enrolled students) began a year ago. So far, only one person has taken one. The Chronicle’s Nanette Asimov writes about UC’s (so far) disastrous experience with MOOCs, the acronym for Massive Open Online Courses. An excerpt:
What UC didn't know in 2010 when its best minds conceived of selling stellar, UC-quality courses online for college credit was that other great universities like Stanford and Harvard were about to start giving theirs away for free.
Higher Education
