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The Georgia Institute of Technology made news when it offered in 2014 a low-cost online master’s degree program in computer science that used MOOCs. It was an experiment and a successful one that now has nearly 4,000 students.

They have talked about testing the MOOC model elsewhere, and now it is expanding with a low-cost online computer science course for undergrads.

They are partnering with edX and McGraw-Hill Education to offer a fully online introductory coding course. The online “Introduction to Computing Using Python” course will feature the same content as their on-campus course (a requirement for all undergraduates). It will be created with McGraw-Hill Education’s adaptive “SmartBook” technology.

Like many other MOOCs, it will be freely available through edX, the nonprofit online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT.The startup plan is to make it available to anyone as a MOOC. It will also have an optional $99 identity-verified certificate. They will pilot the course in February 2017 with about 50 of its own students and it will carry college credit for them.

They are not currently planning an undergraduate degree in computer science like their masters degree, 

This expansion is part of a larger trend towards degrees in which students spend less time on campus. MIT (which co-founded edX) is another school looking at whether freshman and senior years could be delivered through online education.

Georgia Tech partnered with Udacity for their master’s degree program and is using edX for the new undergraduate course and they also offer online courses via Coursera.

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news.gatech.edu/2016/11/01/taking-undergraduate-computer-science-online?

edx.org/school/gtx