The Australian

By Julie Hare

A GLOBAL ranking of massive open online courses can't be too far away and would do more good than harm, say two leading researchers.

With platform providers such as Coursera, Udacity and EdX unwilling to share the success of individual courses, Sean Gallagher and Geoffrey Garrett write exclusively in HES online today that a league table could corral the opinions of users into a powerful information source.

''A global MOOC league table would be the ultimate in crowd-sourced intelligence on teaching in higher education,'' they write. Although students are accustomed to using league tables based on research performance to choose an institution, ''students care much more about what is interesting in the (virtual) classroom than who is pushing back the frontiers of knowledge in the lab''.

This article originally appeared in The Australian.