The Future of Higher Education
http://www.thebestcolleges.org/ Online courses began around 1990 with the growth of more widespread access to the Internet . They spread rapidly in the United States during the last half of the 1990’s buoyed by the dot-com boom , and fell sharply after that bubble burst. During this early period, online courses typically charged fees. Some of the courses catered to individuals who wanted to improve their job prospects, others were meant solely for intellectual enjoyment, while some could be used to obtain college degrees. For-profit schools with physical facilities, such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix , were often sponsors of online courses, although a few of these courses were sponsored by nonprofit universities. What is new about the MOOCs (which stands for “massive open online courses”) is not the use of the Internet to instruct in particular subjects, but that they are free, and they often are sponsored by some of the very best universities, such as...