You may have never heard of them but MOOCs are catching on nationwide, and now Florida has entered the fray to offer a university education for free.
MOOCs or, massive open online courses hit it big in summer 2011, when Stanford University offered a free course that ended up enrolling 160,000 people worldwide -- 23,000 finished the artificial-intelligence class, according to a report from Scientific American.
Roughly 75 universities worldwide offer MOOCs, which are provided by three main companies -- Coursera, Udacity and edX -- in the U.S. Britain is also working to bring its own version, Futurelearn, online later this year. Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Johns Hopkins and more have all signed up to offer their professors and coursework up, free of charge.
Now, the University of Florida, the first university to offer the free courses in the state, has expanding its menu. After new classes added this week, UF is offering four classes, which have already enrolled nearly 100,000 people around the globe and growing. There is no university admission or tuition requirement for the courses, but students do not receive credit for them.
Among the universities' offerings, administered through Coursera, are Economic Issues, Food & You, Sustainable Agricultural Land Management, the Global Sustainable Energy: Past, Present and Future, and the most popular offering Fundamentals of Human Nutrition, whose enrollment exceeds 45,000 students, according to statistics provided by the university. UFs total brick-and-mortar enrollment is just above that one class.
According to W. Andrew McCollough, associate provost for teaching and technology, the university is offering the MOOCs in order to make UF more accessible to people around the globe. Secondly, the institution will learn from Coursera, who provides services to 62 universities, how to offer courses to massive amounts of students at one time.
While some detractors say MOOCs will steal students from pay-to-learn organizations, like the University ofPhoenix, others see it as a way to expand educational offerings to the underserved and as a means to possibly accommodate an expanding student population.Estimates project that by 2025, the world will need to accommodate an additional 98 million students, according to UNESCO, which would require more than four major universities -- with admissions of 30,000 students -- to open every week for the next 15 years.
Whatever the case may be, UF sees the future of MOOCs and is planning to expand its offerings in the summer, when five courses will begin June 1.
Anne Smith writes special to Sunshine State News.
