This article, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, looks at the growth of micro-master’s online degrees. Micro-master’s programs are a series of short online courses that learners can take, roughly equivalent to between a quarter to a half of the course material in a typical master’s degree. Last fall, MIT piloted a micro-master’s in supply-chain management, and now more than a dozen colleges have announced similar programs. The colleges are part of the edX consortium, which helps institutions deliver free MOOCs. MOOC providers Coursera and edX are shifting towards professional education, and according to the article, “many selective colleges have been refining their MOOC efforts and now see short-form credentials as a way to use large-scale online courses for marketing and new revenue.”
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Online-Micro-Master-s-/237836