CAPE TOWN: These online courses promised to enable universities to reach would-be students in the most inaccessible and deprived parts of the planet. But the sustainability of Moocs has come under question – and a new generation of more carefully targeted distance learning courses have entered the arena.
These post-Mooc courses are typically not as “massive” as Moocs, nor quite as “open”. And they are not only coming from the elite academic institutions of the West, but from ambitious tech-savvy operators in emerging economies.
For example, last month the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched a 12-week course in Future Commerce, with more than a thousand students paying $2,300 (£1,730). Another 600 students are already in the queue for the next run of this course in August.
They’ve signed up to an MIT course, they’ll get an MIT-branded certificate. But it’s possible they might never realise that the course has been designed, built and managed by a company thousands of miles from the US. The company is GetSmarter, based in Cape Town, South Africa.
