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Donna Murdoch
Reputation. At this point, if a top tier Professor hasn't "staked their claim" on what they consider their topic of expertise, they are giving that topic to someone else. Imagine if you considered yourself one of the foremost experts in the country in your field. It is a land grab of credibility and expertise, and right now a very real reason that they are not diluting their brand, but actually solidifying it both for the Professor personally and in terms of the Institution. There will be others after, but the one who is first is going to be THAT person, plain and simple. Also, things are moving at light speed, and there is a perfect storm of reasons why this generation may be the last to experience Higher Education as we know it.
Remember, although today University of Washington announced that some Coursera courses will be enhanced to provide partial content for some of their "for credit" courses given in smaller classes, they are not created to be credit courses. These schools are not giving away credits, they are giving away a sample. 75% of the MOOC audience is International - and there we have another reason for "giving away" content on MOOCs. It is a fantastic international recruiting tool for the Universities.
I am purposefully leaving out the social good aspect of it all because I do believe that's a given underneath it all. But other quantitative reasons for having them include data! Big data. Lots of great data about the students that they give in order to register. And, at least in Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Course last summer, the top 1000 students (they began with 170,000, ended with I believe 25,000) received letters from Sebastian Thrun asking to pass around resumes to his friends at Google, etc. Is there a better way to vet potential employees?
My list can go on and on, and I don't think Coursera is something that will replace online education students will pay for to get credit. That's an entirely different topic (do they need degrees, etc.) I just wanted to answer the question at hand.
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Reputation. At this point, if a top tier Professor hasn't "staked their claim" on what they consider their topic of expertise, they are giving that topic to someone else. Imagine if you considered yourself one of the foremost experts in the country in your field. It is a land grab of credibility and expertise, and right now a very real reason that they are not diluting their brand, but actually solidifying it both for the Professor personally and in terms of the Institution. There will be others after, but the one who is first is going to be THAT person, plain and simple. Also, things are moving at light speed, and there is a perfect storm of reasons why this generation may be the last to experience Higher Education as we know it.
Remember, although today University of Washington announced that some Coursera courses will be enhanced to provide partial content for some of their "for credit" courses given in smaller classes, they are not created to be credit courses. These schools are not giving away credits, they are giving away a sample. 75% of the MOOC audience is International - and there we have another reason for "giving away" content on MOOCs. It is a fantastic international recruiting tool for the Universities.
I am purposefully leaving out the social good aspect of it all because I do believe that's a given underneath it all. But other quantitative reasons for having them include data! Big data. Lots of great data about the students that they give in order to register. And, at least in Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Course last summer, the top 1000 students (they began with 170,000, ended with I believe 25,000) received letters from Sebastian Thrun asking to pass around resumes to his friends at Google, etc. Is there a better way to vet potential employees?
My list can go on and on, and I don't think Coursera is something that will replace online education students will pay for to get credit. That's an entirely different topic (do they need degrees, etc.) I just wanted to answer the question at hand.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
