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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Gates foundation and ACE go big on MOOC-related grants | Inside Higher Ed

Gates foundation and ACE go big on MOOC-related grants | Inside Higher Ed:


Establishment Opens Door for MOOCs
November 13, 2012 - 11:03am
The clearest path to college credit for massive open online courses may soon be through credit recommendations from the American Council of Education (ACE), which announced today that it will work with Coursera to determine whether an initial group of 8-10 MOOCs should be worth credit. The council is also working on a similar arrangement with EdX, a MOOC-provider created by elite universities.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding that effort as part of a wide-reaching group of new MOOC-related grants, including research projects to be led by ACE, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and Ithaka S+R, a research group that will team up with the University System of Maryland to test and study the use of massive open online courses across the system. (See related article on the latter effort here.)
Until now, MOOCs have been a source of fascination mostly because they make teaching by top-notch professors at prestigious universities free and available on the Internet to students anywhere


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/13/gates-foundation-and-ace-go-big-mooc-related-grants#ixzz2C7ekE92A
Inside Higher Ed