We at immersv have just finished listening to today’s Radio-4 programme: ‘Zeitgeisters’, which was all about MOOC’s and how they are changing the entire landscape of higher education.  The programme featured interviews with Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng.  For those of you who don’t know … Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng are the two Stanford Professors who cofounded ‘Coursera’, a pioneering, massively online open course delivery platform, which was launched in 2012 (although they had been delivering online education through other channels prior to that).

What was particularly interesting was Kollers discussion about monetisation.  In January this year, Coursera launched a certificated set of programmes called: ‘Signature Track’.  The way distance students interact with their computer (keystroke patterns for example) is tracked and analysed, and this helps to create a biometric signature.  Whilst not a totally foolproof system, it is the basis of a paid for ‘verified certificate’ which costs around $50 if you pass the module.  The verified certificate is a permanent record, available to future potential employers, which confirms that the candidate passed the course.  Koller said that so far, since January, they have issued around 10,000 verified certificates across the five course pilot project.

The other area explored in the programme was how MOOC’s are likely to impact teaching in the developing world, where the relentless demand for higher education is far outstripping their ability to build and staff new centres of learning.

These two things: monetisation of online courses and the demand from an ever increasing global audience , probably means that MOOC’s are here to stay.

You can listen to the programme again on the BBC iPlayer here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036j3qc

If you haven’t seen Koller’s 2012  TED talk on this subject, you probably should do.