The Best in Free Online Education: a MOOCS Primer

"A large percentage of the people that take Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) are not necessarily the intended audience, and people that should use them don’t always know about them. This article helps to inform a curious person about MOOCS. What are they? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Where’s the best place to take a course? And where is this innovation in education headed? Are they still the future of education? Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) have been around for several years, but really sprung to life and got a lot of attention in 2012. Now they are entering a “where-do-we-go-next” period: reexamining their goals and target audience, developing more usable credentials for students, and trying to generate revenue. As the major players navigate these decisions and make changes to their platforms, one thing remains the same: MOOCS are an undeniably awesome idea. What’re MOOCS Exactly? For the uninitiated, MOOCS are free college-level courses accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. The largest purveyors of the service include Coursera, Udacity, and EdX. All of them started with the common goal of making high-quality education available to a larger audience. Udacity has always been more targeted for computer science and technology courses, and has evolved to focus on workforce-ready skills taught by industry experts. Coursera and EdX both have a much broader range of courses from the technical to the humanities and are university-based."