An Idea Whose Time Has Come

The idea of online education is not new. Yet, 2012 marked the beginnings of a revolution that is arguably unparalleled in online education’s 50-year history. The “year of the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course)” took the world by storm, as educators from some of the world’s best universities launched three big initiatives – Udacity, Coursera and EdX — within months of each other. And with that, a previously elite education became accessible to the world, online, for free!

And did the world welcome it with open arms! Last week, Coursera signed on its four-millionth user, quicker than Facebook reached the same milestone. The California Senate is discussing a bill that will require universities to give college credit for MOOCs. Udacity and Georgia Tech announced an online master’s degree in Computer Science for a fraction of what the on-campus equivalent costs. To me, these augur that higher education (and not just online education) is about to change forever.

But wait, online education is not just about MOOCs and their seemingly overnight success. Remember Khan Academy and the multi-million dollar grants it received from Google and the Gates Foundation? It took Sal Khan five years of hard work before getting noticed. Ever heard of Lynda.com? Their library of a few thousand online courses has been used by hundreds of thousands of learners since 1995. MIT OpenCourseWare, in over a decade of existence, has benefited 100 million learners and inspired open learning initiatives at many other universities. Then there are myriad specialized course providers — CodeAcademy and Treehouse for programming languages, Babbel and Duolingo for foreign languages, and marketplaces like Udemy, WizIQ and Skillshare that allow anyone to create a course and open it to the world.

With this abundance of high quality learning resources, each with its own pedagogy and delivery mechanism, the problem begins to take a different shape. It is not about finding a course, but the course which is best suited to one’s need. That’s the problem we have set out to solve at Springboard. Our goal is to make it really easy for learners to discover, compare and recommend the best online courses.

It’s been said that even the mightiest army cannot resist an idea whose time has come. We believe that online education today is just that sort of idea (more on this in a later post). Springboard is our own little way of spurring the revolution forward.

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