Communications of the ACM
Online Courses Put Pressure on Third-World niversities
Credit: U.S. News
When prominent U.S. universities began offering free college classes over the Web this year, more than half of the students who signed up were from outside the United States. Consider the story of one of them: Carlos Martinez, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of El Salvador.
Last spring, Martinez enrolled in a class on electronic circuits offered by edX, the $60 million collaboration between MIT and Harvard to stream "massive open online courses," or MOOCs, over the Web. He thought it was so good that he began traveling around El Salvador to convince others to join the class and launched a blog in English to document his adventures.
It’s an adventure because Martinez doesn’t have the backing of his university. This fall, he signed up 50 students—about one-tenth of the electrical engineering majors at his school—to take the edX circuits class. "I'm like a carnival barker," Martinez says. "It's all very chaotic."
From MIT Technology Review
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