What Is a MOOC? AND Why I Recommend Them
MOOC (/muːk/) stands for massive open online courses.
A massive open online course is an online aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and assignments, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants. MOOCs were first introduced in 2008 and have become increasingly popular.
According to The New York Times, 2012 became “the year of the MOOC” as several well-financed providers, associated with top universities, emerged, including Coursera, edX, and Udacity.
There are dozen of participating universities including: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Caltech, the University of Texas at Austin, Duke, Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, Wellesley College, Australian National University, Boston University, Sorbonne, University of Maryland and Georgetown University.
Many MOOC offerings are free or inexpensively priced. Some are self-paced.
Note From Lynn Lubell (Publisher of AdmissionScoop and Founder of Admission By Design): I encourage Admission By Design students, who complete MOOCs, to include them on their resumes and activity lists and/or additional information section. Self-learning can show initiative, motivation, and intellectual vitality.
Below are links to five popular sites for MOOC learning:
Popular MOOCs
https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x
https://www.coursera.org/learn/python
https://www.edx.org/course/so-you-want-become-biomedical-engineer-ieeex-biomed01x-0
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-aerospace-engineering-mitx-16-00x-0
https://www.edx.org/course/calculus-1a-differentiation-mitx-18-01-1x
