Open online courses were first talked about almost ten years ago, when Canadian educators from the University of Manitoba managed to launch a course “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge,” which gathered more than two thousand subscribers. As the number and popularity of the first online courses grew, it became clear that this was not a new Internet fashion trend, but a modern answer to many shortcomings and omissions of the traditional educational system. For example, in the USA, studying at universities has always been a costly pleasure and not everyone was able to get a quality higher education.
The first open mass educational platform – Khan Academy – appeared in the online space in 2006. Today, Khan Academy provides more than five thousand completely free courses, and its team has grown from one person to a team of 80 employees.
But the real breakthrough in online education came in 2012, which The New York Times called “the year of massive open online courses.
The reason for this was the emergence of the websites edX, Coursera, and Udacity, which since their founding have received substantial financial support, some from prominent universities and others from venture capital.
And if just ten years ago only a handful of selected students, who could take courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or study the basics of programming under the tutelage of Harvard University professors, could afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars for such education, with the appearance of university courses online free access to the best treasures of knowledge on the planet became open to everyone who has a computer and an Internet connection.
Only a few years after online university lectures began to gain popularity in the world, more and more higher educational establishments began to talk about the perspective of the so-called blended education, the essence of which is that the courses of the best professors become the basis for studying at other universities, while the progress of students online is carried over into their diplomas. This approach is designed to combine the best of offline and online academic education. According to experts, this will bring education to a qualitatively new level, because only the best local teachers and universities will be able to compete with lecturers from world universities.