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Open online courses expanding and a completely online course university targets 1 year tuition of $1500 or less
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As online education platforms like Coursera, edX, and Udacity burst onto the scene over the past year, backers have talked up their potential to democratize higher education in the countries that have had the least access. These ambitions are now moving closer to reality, as more people begin to experiment with their setup, although significant challenges remain.
One of the major challenges for MOOCs (massive open online courses)—which so far mostly come from U.S. universities—is to tailor the content of courses to a diverse worldwide audience with any number of combinations of language, educational, motivational, and cultural backgrounds.
In February, edX, the nonprofit platform started last year at Harvard and MIT, added Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne as a partner. Though its first courses will be in English, the school is now thinking about offering a civil engineering course designed for Francophone regions in East and Central Africa, according to an edX spokesman.
As MOOCs cast their eye to the developing world, very minor tweaks matter a great deal, such as the ability to allow students to download, rather than only stream course videos. But even more major ones are coming, including edX’s plans to start open-sourcing its platform in the next few months, which could allow even more universities to post online courses, and software programmers around the world to experiment with customized interfaces.
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2013-03-15 01:16:32 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/03/open-online-courses-expanding-and.html
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