image credit: American Council on Education

The New York Times recently reported on how colleges may soon begin to allow massive open online courses (MOOCs) to be eligible for transfer credits, and used as introductory and remedial courses.

The American Council on Education, a group for higher education, and Coursera, a MOOC provider, are conducting a project to determine if certain free online courses should be eligible for credit at traditional colleges. Their faculty will evaluate how much students learn from the MOOCs. Students seeking credit for the classes would have to pay a fee to take an identity-verified, proctored exam, and could have transcripts sent to colleges.

According to the NYTimes, “The project is being watched closely by higher-education experts who expect MOOCs to broaden access to higher education and bring down the costs.

Also on Tuesday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced 13 grants, totaling more than $3 million, for MOOC research. The grants are intended to encourage the development of MOOCs in introductory courses, like developmental math and writing, to see how they might be integrated into community colleges to bolster completion, and to develop a pathway for MOOC transfer credit.”

On February 11-12, 2013, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a visioning workshop titled, “Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education.” Participants will look beyond the current high-profile interest in MOOCs, and to ideate on important research questions over the next 10 years in all areas of computing in support of massively open online education.

image credit: Coursera