Dive Summary:
- Brown University has launched the massive open online course (MOOC) for high school students considering an engineering degree.
- Brown's MOOC seeks to teach high school students what it means to be an engineer; instead of videos, the MOOC challenges students with activities and research projects.
- Brown claims this is the first MOOC for high school students, although the University of Miami made the same claim last year.
From the article:
"... If the program is truly unprecedented, as Brown’s team has come to believe, it could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.
'The real goal here is to get students interested in engineering to better understand engineering, so that they can make good decisions about what they do in the next step,' said Wendy Drexler, director of online development at Brown. 'If they decide that they’re interested in engineering and they want to apply to different engineering schools, we want them to have all the information they need.' ..."