Free Online Education Unwelcome In Minnesota

An anonymous reader sends this quote from the Chronicle of Higher Education: "[Minnesota's] Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC's, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there. It's unclear how the law could be enforced when the content is freely available on the Web, but Coursera updated its Terms of Service to include the following caution: 'Notice for Minnesota Users: Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.' Tricia Grimes, a policy analyst for the state's Office of Higher Education, said letters had been sent to all postsecondary institutions known to be offering courses in Minnesota."

Comments

Common requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a requirement in EVERY state. We are dealing with it now at my university as we start to offer online classes - you have to register with each state's department of education (or equivalent). For most, it is a simple letter; others require more. I admit that this is the first time I have heard of this being applied to non-credit courses.

The sentence "Ms. Koller, who is on leave from her position as a professor of computer science at Stanford, said she wasn’t aware of any other states with similar restrictions." just shows that Ms. Koller is not very experienced.

Re:Common requirement

[jythie]

Looking through their site, while they never claim to be accredited, they strongly imply they are equivalent, including throwing around 'university' quite a bit.. though very carefully never actually calling themselves one. To people familiar with the venture this probably seems fine, but to someone just glancing over it, it looks pretty shady, like the layed things out so it was just technically within the law but gives the consumer an impression it is more then it is.

However, since it is free, I am not sure how it all ties together. I suspect regulators looked over the site and said 'this looks fishy', and this could be cleared up with a couple of phone calls.

Re:Common requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't read too well if that is the conclusion you came to.. Coursera is not an institution but a common delivery platform for Universitues like Berkeley, Duke and Stanford to make their courses available for free and without offering academic credit to the community at large. Of course the throw the term University around a lot because it is the delivery channel for top notch universities to give something to the community at large. Oh wait, content for free? I see your point, from the US point of view that would be a threat to IP so yeah.. def shady. Better sue Stanford, Duke and all those bad peoples and hand it all over to the MPAA and disney

Minnesota...beautiful place

[dywolf]

Scary politicians

Re:State legislature, huh?

[rubycodez]

news for you, legally and by definition it only takes two to have a conspiracy.

http://definitions.uslegal.com/c/conspiracy/

Re:Huh?

[sumdumass]

No they are not. They are saying that any post secondary education institutions offering courses within the state has to register with the state.

But Ms. Grimes said the law the letters refer to isnâ(TM)t new. âoeThis has been a longtime requirement in Minnesota (at least 20 years) and applies to online and brick-and-mortar postsecondary institutions that offer instruction to Minnesota residents as part of our overall responsibility to provide consumer protection for students,â she wrote in an e-mail.

The law says (**PDF warning) "All schools located within Minnesota and all schools located outside Minnesota which offer degree programs or courses within Minnesota shall register annually with the office."

It clearly says courses. So all they need to do is simply register with the state to comply. It's a consumer protection law that is supposed to weed out scams. It doesn't seem to make a distinction between charging to attend or not.

Most posters here haven't a clue what Coursera is.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Coursera and many of the comments show that few posters haven't a clue what Coursera is.

1. Coursera IS a collaborative effort among major Universites (I am using it to take courses from
the University of Michigan, Duke and Stanford). There is no such thing as a Coursea course, it is
only a channel by which existing well respectedUniversities offer their courses to the larger online community.

2. More specifically Coursea is a channel for self education and does not offer ANY academic credit
from institutions that use that channel for their courses. They also do not charge. There is no such
thing as a "Coursera transcript"

3. Coursera is not unique. There is a similar collaborative effort between Harvard and MIT to offer their
courses on line in a similar manner called edx.org.

The law is clearly misapplied since Coursera is not a university or academic institution no does it claim to be, the
law would only apply to all the Universities that use Coursera. Of course I suppose once you really have to
keep an eye on those shady, fly by night operations like Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Yale.

Re:Or

[Khyber]

GeoIP location is absolute shit. I live in Riverside California, GeoIP says I'm in Nevada.