Recently I told you all about MOOCs – Massive Open On-line Courses. They are classes taught, often by professors at major universities and colleges and streamed around the world on the internet. You can take business from Harvard or quantum physics from Caltech right from the comfortable seat in front of your computer.

They’re the on-line college of the future, today!

While I was asked by my colleagues to write a blog post on “what MOOCs would you like to see” I think I took it a little too literally. I instead came up with some MOOCs that I, Robin Green would like to see. Classes that are meaningful to me, and literally no one else.

Classes such as:

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Remember when they said that in the future you’d have a flying car, food in the form of a pill (who wants that) and teleportation, but instead all we got was weird Miley Cyrus dance routines with teddy bears? Well there’s one thing we were promised in the future that is now here: college by computer. And it’s called a “MOOC.”

What a MOOC is

MOOC stands for MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES. They are classes that are taught on site at an actual university (like Berkely or MIT) but are broadcast on the web to thousands and potentially millions of students around the world either via streaming or by use of a video site such as YouTube. While most MOOCs are simply individual classes that are provided to users, some MOOCs (known sometimes as XMOOCS) enhance the experience by offering on-line quizzes, message boards and chat functions that create an on-line community, sometimes led by a teacher, that replicates the traditional college experience.

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