Dive Brief:
- Now that Sebastian Thrun is moving toward vocational education with Udacity, experts are asking what that means for the future of MOOCs
- Some aspects of MOOCs are proceeding ahead unchanged: Coursera just landed another $20 million in new funding and launched an iOS app, and Udacity is continuing with its Georgia Tech partnership to offer a computer science master's degree.
- But at least one expert sees all of this as just another stage in online learning: MOOCs have never really been just one thing and they're continuing to evolve.
Dive Insight:
Whereas "MOOC" has been a label that applied more or less equally to Udacity, Coursera and edX, it's easy to imagine a future where those companies diverge and the MOOC label stretches to accommodate a lot of different things — or perhaps even stretches beyond usefulness. In a few years, we may look back at Udacity's turn to vocational training as the first step in a big differentiation of online learning companies and platforms.