Dive Summary:
- On Monday, massive open online course (MOOC) startup iversity announced its first ten courses after being selected through an open competition; to see iversity's first ten courses, go to their website.
- Based out of Berlin, Germany, iversity received over 250 MOOC proposals from 30 professors across 20 countries.
- Higher education is much more economical for students in Europe, but that hasn't stopped iversity from pushing the MOOC concept. Iversity CEO and co-founder Hannes Klöpper said, “We’re still very much in an evangelism phase. That’s the kind of work we’re doing – we’re demonstrating in a very visible way how this can play out with instructors here and… we’re talking to the institutional decision-makers to move [the conversation].”
From the article:
In the U.S., for example, MOOCs are often pitched in the context of the country’s cost crisis in higher education. But Klöpper said that, in Europe, where higher education is largely low-cost, the bigger issue is around quality.
“This is not a Facebook market where you have one platform and you translate that interface [for everyone]. It’s going to be much more nuanced… Each [educational] system has its own issues,” he said. “And I definitely do believe that digitization – and the MOOC phenomenon as the most visible aspect of that – is part of the answer to issues in each of these systems, but it will play out in very different ways.”