The higher education online learning gloves are now officially off. Let’s first recap the dizzying pace of change, announcements and launches that have occurred since the Fall of 2011 between Udacity, Coursera, MITx and the latest free-learning darling, edX. October 10 – Official launch of Introduction to AI (origin of Udacity) as well as Introduction to Databases and Machine Learning (origin of Coursera) December 19 - MITx is announced January 1 – Charles West Ventures invests $5m into Udacity (or is it Know Labs?) January 23 – Professor Thrun officially announces Udacity thus breaking away from Stanford February 20 – First official Udacity courses launch - CS 101: Building a Search Engine and CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car March 5 – MITx launches first course 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) April 18 –
khan academy Archive
Rest assured, I am not against The Khan Academy … at least not entirely. There are several reasons to celebrate what its founder, Sal Khan, and the team have done: A discussion about ‘flipping the classroom’ (as the Economist helped point out) has become mainstream, if not a healthy obsession Outlets such as TED, Charlie Rose and even Stephen Colbert have helped push the topic of education reform to the masses by interviewing or showcasing Sal Khan Videos and learning have become an essential component of the learning cycle; as opposed to some form of babysitting tool. See this short video for an example Even vendors like Cisco are producing white papers outlining the benefits of video in education Where I take umbrage with The