Whether you want to advance your career, change careers, learn a new skill, or learn for fun, there’s a MOOC for that! Company training managers can guide learning and development very cost-effectively . The term MOOC means “Massively Open Online Course” and refers to no-cost (or low cost), online education and courseware. Today the MOOC market is focused on providing academic-level courses to stu
dents around the world at little to no cost. Originally pioneered by Stanford, MIT, Harvard and other universities, MOOC’s started in 2008 and expanded rapidly in 2011 and 2012 as professors and universities started putting their courses online using many ‘platforms’ developed for the purpose. Today this market has become legitimate and platforms like EdX, Udacity, Coursera, and others (venture or University funded) are building out large libraries of free or low cost content. This market is rapidly evolving as these companies build industrial-strength learning platforms and expand their content. While today most MOOCs are not offering accredited educational degrees, they are experimenting with this model and now starting corporate partnerships to create academies and corporate content portals at a fee. Other vendors like Udemy offer “no cost” or “low cost” content online from a wide variety of authors (self-published). So the MOOC market, which originally started in higher education, is rapidly expanding into corporate and personal learning as well. MOOCtracks.com a comprehensive directory of MOOCs, allows you to access the course that best fits your needs no matter where on the Internet it resides.