Communications of the ACM
Exploring Credits For Free Online Courses
Daphne Koller
The American Council on Education (ACE), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Coursera have launched an initiative to determine if free online courses are worthy of academic credit and how they might be used to help more people pursue college degrees.
The announcement is the latest sign of the emerging influence of massive open online courses (MOOCs). As part of the initiative, Coursera will pay ACE a fee to evaluate the credit worthiness of a selection of its courses. A recommendation from ACE that the courses are worthy of credit would be a key step toward helping students obtain transfer credit from other schools. If that path to credit becomes a reality, "it is going to push more people into college and make them more successful," says Stanford University professor and Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller.
The Gates Foundation is awarding ACE more than $895,000 in grants to coordinate research on MOOCs and convene university presidents for an innovation lab to discuss strategies to capitalize on the potential of MOOCs. ACE also is in discussions with edX, a nonprofit MOOC venture led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, about analyzing its courses.
From Washington Post
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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