Last week, MIT announced they’re making Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) part of their admissions process–candidates for their one-year Supply Chain Management master’s program will enhance their chances of acceptance into the program if they successfully complete relevant MOOCs before application. If they are accepted into the program, they will get credit for their online work and only have to complete one semester on campus to get their degree.
Why is this exciting? Like adaptive courseware, MOOCs are fairly new. The University of Manitoba’s Stephen Downes and George Siemens built the first online course called a MOOC in 2008 to see just how learning might be accomplished using the internet. Since then there’s been a lot of speculation about how MOOCs fit into the broad spectrum of education.
Tags: Adaptive Learning Technology • admissions • courseware • Ed Tech Trends • Higher Education Strategy • moocs • testing