How MOOC Are Competing with Traditional College Degree Courses

What are MOOCs?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are increasing day by day from various renowned universities like Harvard, MIT etc and even IIT. What makes MOOCs better than traditional college courses? What creates the need for it? Technology is bringing new innovation everyday from artificial intelligence, new coding languages. Modern economy is all about learning and educating ourselves.

Does that means formal college degrees such as MBA or PhD are not important? In traditional age too, there existed distance education via radio, television broadcast courses, e-learning. Later after 2000s, there were significant amount of changes in distance education with online classes, courses, leading to progress of various MOOCs.

If you want to learn anything, all you got to find is an online course, register for it, and find time to complete the courses. There are various platforms which offer various insightful courses such as Coursera, Edx, Udemy etc.

About Coursera

Coursera was founded by two Stanford Computer Science professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. The platform is ventured –backed and focuses on educating via technology. It is based in California and the startup ties up with various universities for almost every subject like engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, data science, etc. It has more than 28 million registered users and has 2000 courses as on October 2017.

Founders of Coursera

The idea was inspired by the duo who were inspired to offer the Stanford Courses online in the fall of 2011. Koller is Israeli and received her bachelor’s and master’s degree from Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the age of 18 itself. She later completed her Ph.D. from University of Berkeley and later joined Stanford University Computer Science Department. She is famous for receiving various awards and recognitions. She has published lot of papers and textbooks on computer science and named as Time’s Magazine 100 Most Influential People in 2012. In 2016, she left Coursera to work at Calico as chief computing officer.

Andrew was born in United Kingdom; he received his undergraduate degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and master’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of  . He also has Ph.D degree from University of California and started working at Stanford University. He was mainly focused on research related to data mining and machine learning. He also worked at Google, where he helped to found the ‘Google Brain Deep Learning Project’. He worked with Koller to start Cousera.

Considering the numbers, investment, users and courses, the startup is really in line with the upcoming tech education. Similar platforms are being introduced every day even in India.

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