Anya Kamenetz, Fast Company Magazine
Tuesday, June 19, 12:30 pm EDT
Hosted by the Berkman Center, Harvard University

This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast and will be archived on the Berkman website.

The selection of free online higher learning experiences–as distinguished from merely raw learning materials, like MIT’s Open Courseware — has expanded greatly in the past six months. Udemy, Coursera, the Minerva Project, Udacity, and edx all offer courses created by faculty at top universities in the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) format, each with some combination of video lectures, exercises, a social component (chat rooms, wikis, Facebook groups) and even a form of certification for your learning. And many of them are offering these courses for free. Much of the conversation around this new wave of education startups has focused on what they mean for the incumbent institutions, from for-profit online universities to the traditional Ivy League. But what about what they mean for learners? Who is currently succeeding in open learning contexts? What are the missing pieces of the ecosystem–from discovery, to peer support, to mentoring, to assessment–that will allow the most severely underserved learners to succeed in this new learning environment?