Rise of the MOOCs

MOOC is a massively online open course. Starting near the end of the first decade of 2000 (i.e. 2010) these courses began to emerge as the convergence of technologies and openness to sharing at large universities combined to create a number of separate enterprises geared towards sharing online courses.

These came after the emergence of Open Educational Resources OER and their promotion had already established a broad spectrum of resources available online for consumption; these did not generally include, however, a way to TAKE the classes, but were more platforms for sharing content. A student could review almost all content but there was no active participation, collaboration, feedback, or even peer-communication.

SOME OER Resources

 * Academic Room - Over 1,000 full-length lecture videos of courses curated from Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Berkley, Duke and Carnegie Mellon, accompanied by course materials such as books, journal articles and syllabi for self-paced learning.
 * Yale Open Courses - "Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn. " - quote from the site...
 * Open Courseware Consortium - "An OpenCourseWare(OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials for colleges and universities. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content." - quote from the site

SOME MOOC Resources

 * Udacity - A company founded by David Stavens, Mike Sokolsky, and Sebastian Thrun, with the stated goal of democratizing education.
 * Coursera - A VC-funded company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University, located in Mountain View, California.
 * edX is a non-profit led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley, that offers university-level courses from a wide range of disciplines online to a worldwide audience at no charge.


 * A Gentle Introduction to Python A innovative coordination by "Mechanical Mooc" using OpenCourseWare, quizzes and exercises from Codecademy, study groups organized through OpenStudy, and a mailing list hosted by Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).
 * University of Reddit -
 * Venture Lab @ Stanford -


 *  An outline of several ongoing MOOCs - "MOOCs Decyphered"