Teachers are using open online courses to keep their knowledge fresh

"Teachers are turning to free MOOCs—massive open online courses— to fill in for what traditional professional-development programs are lacking." These massive open online courses may help improve education worldwide, by enhancing learning at traditional, brick-and-mortar public schools.

And the results could be powerful. More than 6,100 of the participants featured in the Harvard/MIT study were teachers who took MOOCs in subjects they already taught. It’s hard to imagine many things with “more potential to lift more people out of poverty” and “unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems.” Perhaps that potential, however, lies in their ability to improve the quality of the country’s public-education system.

Source: How MOOCs Could Reform Education Completely by Accident - The Atlantic