Big changes on the Web last year in online education

In 2012, the biggest changes on the Web were in online education, social networks, and the increasing use of smartphones and tablets. | MIT Technology Review: "For all the attention lavished on the Web’s growth on mobile devices this year, one of the most interesting Internet trends is still best experienced on a desktop computer: online education. The rising cost of higher education (the average bachelor’s degree now costsmore than $100,000), combined with increasing access to high-speed Internet service and a desire for more efficient and flexible learning methods, brought new prominence to websites offering free or low-priced courses in everything from programming to literature. Free online code-learning startup Codecademy’seffort to teach novices to code snagged more than 400,000 participants for its weekly lessons in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Harvard and MIT joined forces to create edX, a $60 million nonprofit company that streams free college courses online, while nearly three dozen schools—including Stanford and Princeton—formed their own free online course site, Coursera, which has more than 1.5 million users so far. Udacity, cofounded by Sebastian Thrun, a Google Fellow and former Stanford researcher, started out by offering a single Stanford artificial intelligence class online for free. It has since grown and now offers 19 different free courses, mostly geared toward computer science and math. And Duolingo, a free crowdsourced language-learning startup cocreated by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn, has about 300,000 users per week learning French, Spanish, English, Italian, German, and Portuguese. Perhaps the most ambitious (and highly funded) online education offering unveiled in the last year was the Minerva Project, which raised $25 million from Benchmark Capital for its plan to offer a completely online college education for about $25,000 a year. We’ll have to wait to gauge the Minerva Project’s impact, though: it’s not starting classes until 2015. Despite the initial wave of enthusiasm, it’s not yet clear whether many of these startups or universities will be able to form sustainable business models, or if online classes can really work well on a large scale (many of the students that sign up for classes don’t actually complete them). Fortunately, because they operate on the Web, these education efforts are able to gather lots of data about how their students are learning—potentially useful for tweaking lessons and improving performance. . . ."


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