Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) are large scale online courses designed to attract interactive learning communities/forums. Courses are intended to be open in nature, whereby students can download course materials, video lectures, homework, etc. for free.
In 2011, Stanford launched 3 MOOCs, the first of which was an “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” with an enrollment of 160,000 students. Following the initial launches, instructors of these courses independently founded two for-profit MOOC platforms, Coursera and Udacity(courses are still free). Concerned about the commercialization of MOOCs MIT, Harvard, and University of California Berkley responded by founding edX, a not-for-profit MOOC platform.
Degreed,, a start-up web application in beta, has begun cataloging MOOCs provided across these platforms and others. The start-up provides a public “dashboard” or profile for individuals that allow them to publish courses they have taken, articles they have read, media they have watched, and conferences they have attended. In their own words, Degreed is,
A free service that scores and validates your lifelong education from both accredited (I.E. Harvard) and non-accredited (I.E. ItunesU, Lynda.com, Khan Acedemy Etc.) sources.
Some of the online learning platforms that Degreed has cataloged, including iTunesU, are as follows:
A good article Hack Education Weekly News: A MOOC Master’s Degree.
Udacity: https://www.udacity.com/
Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/
edX: https://www.edx.org/
Degreed: http://degreed.com/