Knowledge@Wharton - Mastering moocs: using open online courses to achieve your goals

Max Buckley was on the cusp of graduating from the Cork Institute of Technology when he stumbled on a relatively new form of online learningthe massive open online course, or MOOC.

Although he was studying business administration, Buckley had an eye for the technological side of things and was regretting not pursuing a more computer-related field. The Circuits and Electronics MOOC from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology caught his eye, so he enrolled in the free course.

Final exams prevented him from finishing it, but he was hooked on the conceptfree classes that he could take online, on his own schedule and offered by some of the most prestigious universities in the world. He kept enrolling in interesting classes and eventually steered himself toward computer programming courses. As luck would have it, he enrolled in a data analysis course at the same time he interviewed for an internship with Google.

An even bigger stroke of luck was finding out his interviewer was also enrolled in that class. Buckley landed the internship, then was hired full time. He is now is a product quality analyst, charged with helping the tech giant fight spam.

It wasnt the sole reason [I got the internship], but a good part of it was that I had this blend of programming and business, and [the learning] was self-directed, he said of his MOOC background. I had the formal education box ticked, but this extra work was interesting. Obviously Ive learned a lot more by using them, and that has fed back into my formal studies.

Buckleys story may be extraordinarynot everyone is going to land a job with Google by taking a few free online coursesbut it demonstrates the growing power of MOOCs as a way to bring world-class education to anyone with time, commitment and an internet connection.

The New World of MOOCs

Online learning isnt new, of course. The first online courses started popping up in the early 1980s. Those early attempts were unsuccessful, however, largely due to technological limitations. The spread of low-cost, high-bandwidth internet connections and the boom in cloud computing have made the MOOC explosion possible.

MOOCs are a distinct brand of learning opportunity. They are large, typically attracting tens of thousands of participants, and have no prerequisites or admission requirements. No one has to apply to get into a MOOC. They are usually shorter than a typical college class and can start at any point throughout the year. Most are free, although some offer the participants the option to pay for a verified certificate that shows they completed the course with a satisfactory grade. Some MOOC providers and universities are also venturing into charging for the classes as part of specialized course packages.

Taking a MOOC means learners (the industry term for MOOC participants) will be at their computera lot. The courses are heavily based on video lectures, online quizzes and assignments that are available on demand, although not all the course content is always available throughout the class period. Assignments are graded not by professors or teaching assistants, but by fellow learners, and the bulk of interaction takes place in online discussion groups or forums.

Universities that offer MOOCs do so, in most cases, through partnerships with providers such as Coursera or edX, which handle the technological and logistical sides of the courses. If youre taking a MOOC from University of California, Berkeley, for example, you wont do so via the UC-Berkeley website; it will be through edX.

Learners typically come to MOOCs for one of two reasons: to fulfill a recreational interest or to achieve some professional advancement by acquiring new skills or improving the ones already in their toolboxes. MOOC offerings are diverse in both directions, with options ranging from Buddhist Meditation and the Modern World (University of Virginia via Coursera) and The Ethics of Eating (Cornell University via edX) on the one side to Foundations of e-Commerce (Nanyang Technological University via Coursera) and Financial Analysis of Entrepreneurial Ideas (Babson Global via NovoED) on the other.