In the fall of 2011, Stanford University offered three of its engineering courses–Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Introduction to Databases–for free online. Anyone with Internet access could sign up for them. As Sebastian Thrun, the director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, tells the story, he assumed just a handful of people would enroll in his graduate-level AI class. Instead, more than 160,000 students registered. A massive number.
That’s when the enormous hype began about massive open online courses, better known as “MOOCs.” Since then, Thrun and his fellow lab professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng have founded education organizations that offer free online classes. Thrun’s start-up is called Udacity (in part, a takeoff on the word “audacious”), and Koller and Ng’s is Coursera. In December 2011, in response to Stanford’s initiatives, MIT launched its own effort, called MITx (short for “Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange”), and a few months later joined forces with Harvard, drolly changing the name of the organization to edX. A consortium of British universities has also created its own MOOC platform, Futurelearn. So far, more than 90 universities worldwide have teamed up with one or more of these MOOC providers, prompting the New York Times to crown 2012 as “The Year of the MOOC.”
Although it’s clear that there’s a flurry of interest in MOOCs among universities, higher-ed students, the tech industry, and pundits, these free online courses are also likely to have a significant impact on K-12 librarians and other educators. As Joyce Valenza, a teacher librarian at Springfield Township High School in Pennsylvania, pointed out on her SLJ blog, “Never Ending Search,” MOOCs “can reach tens of thousands of students of all ages, regardless of geography or social class. They have the potential to be equalizers. MOOCs have the potential to disrupt traditional education platforms. And experts predict they will.”