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