I love massive online education. Not only because I see their potential to change how accessible education is, but I find many exciting topics for my own advancement too. In the last few years, I learned algorithms, had a very hard but rewarding course on Scala programming, and broadened my soft skills with entrepreneurship studies.

I like that most of these courses are offered by well established universities, which are very capable of teaching. The subjects are mostly at higher education level; some of them are quite hard to accomplish.

When I started with Coursera a few years back, they offered almost everything for free. Then they started offering paid options to courses, meaning you’ll get a verified certificate upon completion. It was a nice way of commercialization; someone who pursued tangible results could pay, and someone who was only after the curriculum still got it free.

Then I was working a bit more and had less time to enroll on courses; only until quite recently I neglected this type of education. Now I see that courses are no longer free. The one I’ve started has the assignments locked. Luckily the videos and the articles are still accessible, but I can not get graded because I can not submit without paying. This makes it less appealing, as homework and grading plays a big part on the learning process.

Seems like this field of education is getting commercialized. If I want to learn things at the familiar places, I need to pay for it. Luckily there are many competitors, often with different business models.

Seems like I have to look around and map the current state of MOOCs. I’m sure there are many good ones out there.