Forging a Connection with 40,000 MOOC Students: A Princeton Professor’s Perspective

How can you teach a course to 40,000 faceless students and still maintain some semblance of a teacher-student connection?

This was the challenge that Professor Mitchell Duneier of Princeton University faced last year when he offered an online course in introductory sociology. The non-credit course was offered free of charge through Coursera, and had an enrollment of 40,000 students from 113 different countries.

Education in the 21st Century [INFOGRAPHIC]

As many states have cut education funding in recent years, schools are struggling to find ways to provide a quality education at a lower cost.

The following infographic from TopMastersInEducation.com demonstrates how collaboration and a blended learning strategy can alleviate this education crisis.

Are MOOCs Just As Effective As Online College Courses?

While MOOC enrollment can sometimes reach over 100,000 students, academics are beginning to wonder about how effective they are in providing a quality education. How successful are MOOCs in helping students acquire, retain, and apply freshly-learned knowledge?

In a recent OpEd article on Newsday.com, Marian Stoltz-Loike, vice president of online education for Touro College, wonders if MOOCs can truly be considered “education” or if perhaps they would be better described as “a new form of entertainment.”

What Did Google Learn from Offering Online Courses?

Between July 2012 and June 2013, Google offered 5 online courses aimed at teaching internet skills to the internet community at large: Power Searching with Google (versions 1 and 2), Advanced Power Searching, Mapping with Google, and YouTube Creator Academy. The 5 courses were taught to a total of approximately 400,000 students around the world.

After the last course was over, Google published several observations on Google’s Research Blog.

Read on to find out some takeaways from Google’s experience with online courses.