MOOCs – Courses on the Internet

Known as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs for short, this form of e-learning has become a popular alternative to on-site classes in the last few years. One major advantage that a MOOC has over more classical forms of classroom education is that the number of participants is theoretically unlimited. Anyone who has an Internet connection can take part.

MOOCs combine traditional forms of knowledge transmission such as lectures with the multimedia opportunities provided by powerful new online tools. That creates a virtual global classroom that allows teachers and students to communicate and interact with one another.

Here’s a current short-list of some of the most popular MOOC sites out there.

International providers:
Courcera
A leading commercial MOOC platform based in the US
Udacity
A commercial platform based in the US that offers courses primarily in the area of IT
edX
A cooperative open e-learning platform set up by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University

German providers:
Leuphana University Lüneburg
Leuphana Digital School
Technical University of Munich
MOOCs at TUM
Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Technology, Potsdam
Social Platform for Interactive Online Courses in Information Technology
Iversity
A platform that provides 20 free online classes, including one on storytelling

Open-source platforms:
– An open-source software platform set up by edX and Google
Open edX doesn’t produce content or classes itself, but does offer free software to people who want to do so
OpenMOOC
A MOOC platform developed in Spain