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sociology:online-universities
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Online Universities


Online courses are of different types

The two largest Massive Open Online Course providers (MOOCS) are Coursera and EDX. Both are headed by for-profit corporations.

EDX used to be a Non-Profit

However, classes can be taken for free with some restrictions and no certification. For those with financial hardship, the full experience can be had through financial assistance.

UK universities hold courses on FutureLearn.com. MOOC providers from other countries listed at Wikipedia.

ClassCentral.com has a list of universities ranked by the number of courses offered online.

MOOCs aren't great due to lack of live student-student and teacher-student interactions, but that can be supplemented by using a MOOC course as part of an in-person attended group or class.

Instructional quality of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Margaryan, Bianco, and Littlejohn 2014

According to this 2014 article, MOOCs also lack “instructional design quality”, which includes the following

Principles of Instruction:

Rather than focusing on improving the course material, for-profit MOOCs spend most of their revenue on advertising, as their profit depends on student recruitment: Your OPM Isn’t a Tech Platform. It’s a Marketing Firm, Stephanie Hall 2023

jparth78 on Reddit made the observation that Coursera is less strict about timelines for course completion.

There are courses in other languages, but finding English courses that have translations to other languages is a bit tricky. For example on Coursera, you can keyword search for “biology” “spanish”, or “physiology” “spanish”. On EDX I haven't found out how.

Related articles:

EDX VS. COURSERA: MOOC SHOWDOWN, Mike Samuels ~2021 is a very detailed comparison. The site is learningselect.com, but it is one man's site offering comparisons of several online MOOCs. There is no date, but based on web.arxhive.org the article hasn't been updated since 2021.

Coursera and edX are two popular online learning platforms — here's how they compare in terms of price and programs offered, businessinsider.com, Julia Pugachevsky 2020


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sociology/online-universities.txt · Last modified: 2023/12/21 04:33 by 127.0.0.1