Editor’s Introduction

Authors

Ada Long, University of Alabama at BirminghamFollow

Date of this Version

2014

Document Type

Article

Citation

Published in Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council, Spring/Summer 2014, Volume 15, Number 1.

Comments

Copyright © 2014 by the National Collegiate Honors Council.

Abstract

For-profit education has surged in the past few years. Although for-profit organizations like DeVry University or ITT Technical Institute have been around for decades (DeVry was established in 1931), the number of such education-producing companies has ballooned in recent years, and within only the past two or three years a new kind of company has burst onto the scene offering massive open online courses (MOOCS). Patterned on edX, a nonprofit company developed by MIT and Harvard in 2011, the for-profit company Coursera was founded by Stanford faculty in 2012, the same year as Udacity, a for-profit MOOC company funded by Venture Capital. Also in 2012, American Honors, a for-profit organization providing online curricula, advising, and marketing in honors, was started by investor-backed Quad Learning, Inc.