Online Education Grows Up, And For Now, It's Free

NPR:

Those universities now offer classes through consortiums like Coursera, a tech company that's partnered with more than 30 of the top universities in the world to offer online classes from its course catalogue -- for free. Other companies offering online courses include Udacity and edX.

Earlier this year in Kazahkstan, 22-year-old computer science student Askhat Muzrabayev had a problem.

"The problem is our university is relatively small, it has about 2,000 students, and we didn't have [Artificial Intelligence] classes in the syllabus," Muzrabayev says.

So Muzrabayev went online to Coursera and enrolled in Stanford's Machine Learning class for free. He watched the lectures, did the quizzes, joined online discussions with students from around the world and then took the final exam. He passed, and when it was over he received a certificate that said he completed an online course at Stanford.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 1, 2012 2:32 AM
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