Over 20,000 students from 150 countries have registered for Georgetown’s first Massive Open Online Course, “Globalization’s Winners and Losers: Challenges for Developed and Developing Countries.” The course, taught by SFS Professor Theodore Moran, will begin on Oct. 1st and last for over seven weeks.
The course is part of the edX initiative, a non-profit site founded by Harvard and MIT that allows people worldwide to participate in university-level courses online for free.
SFS associate professor Rodney Ludema, one of the faculty members who contributed to Moran’s course, is optimistic about the prospects of this new approach to education.
“[Massive Open Online Courses] have the potential to enhance the external reputation of Georgetown,” Ludema wrote in an email to the Voice. However, he worries that the courses could become sensationalized as competition for enrollment intensifies. “[They] are costly to produce but are freely available to viewers. I wonder how long that model can be sustained.”
Georgetown plans to offer additional online courses in the spring on counterterrorism, bioethics, and genomic medicine.
