The Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley collaboration to offer the best of all three institutions free online.
Published in Chapter:
The MOOCs: Characteristics, Benefits, and Challenges to Both Industry and Higher Education
John F. LeCounte (Texas A&M University, USA) and Detra Johnson (Texas A&M University, USA)
Copyright: © 2015
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8170-5.ch011
Abstract
In this chapter, the authors present the rapid rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) derived from a yearning to create and make widely available materials and conditions for participatory learning and creative space dedicated to the open education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were developed to provide open, meaning unrestricted, online courses without higher education cost constraints to students. This new technological platform was embraced, developed, and offered by some of the country's leading universities and institutions including Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Students may collaborate through strategic social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Further, according to LeCounte et al. (2014), the social media partnerships have been found to offer competitive advantages in terms of low cost and tremendous visibility to both corporations and institutions of higher learning.