Online higher education retools: MOOCs aren't dead; they're evolving.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Massive open online courses

ONLINE HIGHER education won't achieve its full promise until Olivia Munn is teaching courses with titles such as "Optimizing Google for Mobile Web Performance." But at least the field is moving in the right direction.

While traditional colleges and universities have played a primary role in the development of massive open online courses (MOOCs), the online pedagogical innovation that has garnered the most media attention over the last few years, at least one company is showing that educators can have names like Google, Intuit, and Salesforce as well as Harvard and MIT.

That company is Udacity, a Silicon Valley start-up that was founded in 2011 by Sebastian Thrun, a moonlighting Google employee and former Stanford professor who pioneered the technology behind driverless cars.

In November, Fast Company reported that Udacity was "abandoning academic disciplines in favor of more vocational-focused learning." This was something of an overstatement--Udacity had never embraced purely academic learning enough to suggest that it was now somehow abandoning it. Reflecting Thrun's background, Udacity's first two courses were "Building a Search Engine" and "Programming a Robotic Car," both of which had more than a little vocational focus. And as early as October 2012, Udacity had announced its intention to partner with companies like Google and Autodesk on courses such as "HTML5 Game Development" and "Interactive Rendering."

This, it turns out, is a promising approach. As Fast Company explained, "The companies pay to produce the classes and pledge to accept the certificates awarded by Udacity for purposes of employment." And while MOOCs have traditionally been open to anyone who wants to take them, at no cost, Udacity is increasingly encouraging students to pay for its courses. While it still offers open access to all its courseware for free, it also now offers students a chance to "enroll" in a handful of classes. These students will get personalized coaching and detailed feedback on assignments and projects, plus a "verified certificate of accomplishment" upon their successful completion.

With an early registration discount of 30 percent, the price for "Introduction to Salesforce App Development," for example, is $105 per month. You complete courses at your own pace. A class might take you two weeks to finish, or it might take you two months or more. (If it's the former, you've still got to pay for a full month.)

Udacity is offering these new services...