Today, CourseTalk is what you might expect — a Yelp for MOOCs — a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they’d enjoy. Still nascent, the platform’s design is simple and its user experience is straightforward. Visitors can sift through courses by “Top Rated,” “Popular” and “Upcoming” or by category, like Business, Computer Science, and so on.
When a space gets its own Yelp, it’s generally an indicator of the fact that a bunch of content or businesses came online at once (or at least it seems that way when viewed from 5 miles up) and end users have no way to make sense of that noise. Sure, there are a lot of schools and programs rushing to take advantage of MOOCs because it’s perceived as a novel technology (even though the MOOC concept has been developing for more than a few months) and because of the scale MOOCs afford.
Short term this site will help potential students sort through the loud, seemingly crowded MOOC field. Longer term the site or other like it may be in a position to be clearinghouses for quality on line courses.