(
Massive
Open
Online
Course) Free online educational courses available to the public at large. The MOOC handles the online delivery of the courseware that has been created by participating schools and organizations. Although various MOOCs were launched in the late 2000s, MOOC activity began to escalate in 2011 when Stanford University offered three courses and several more in 2012.
Also in 2012, MIT and Harvard launched their MOOC under the edX banner; Coursera started offering courses from several universities, and Udacity began to deliver courses sponsored by universities and high-tech vendors.
In just a few years, hundreds of thousands of people have taken advantage of the education, and certification is available in some cases for a fee to the sponsoring university. See
CBT,
courseware and
e-learning.