MOOCs

I am a fairly recent user of Coursera, a leading Massive Open Online Course provider. I have started but not finished (which is, I understand, what happens to the "massive" majority of people who sign up) a few classes on statistics and programming. I am, however, trying to hang in there for the excellent Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics by University of Washington's Professor Eric Zivot.

There is a lot of hype along with some controversy (for an overview, read this New York Times article for example) over this MOOC phenomenon, one that has only very recently reached critical mass (no pun intended here) and gained media attention. I find this post from the Simply Statistics blog sheds a welcome no-nonsense (which is what you'd expect from a Statistician) light on this new approach to teaching and learning:

[...] Top researchers end up at top universities but being good at research does not necessarily mean you are a good teacher. Furthermore,  the effort required to be a competitive researcher leaves limited time for class preparation. To make matters worse, within a university, faculty have a monopoly on the classes they teach. With few incentives and  practically no competition it is hard to believe that top universities are doing the best they can when it comes to classroom instruction. By introducing competition, MOOCs might change this. [...]