A market for MOOCs?

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MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) just keep on coming and it's getting hard to keep up with developments. Hot on the heels of the MITx initiative comes Stanford University's  Coursera solution. Coursera is at present a basic presentation of a range of free online courses that the university is offering this term and is not dissimilar to the Udacity venture started by ex-Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and colleagues. So if you're looking for free university level courses there has never been a better time but how on earth are potential students expected to find these courses?

Enter Class Central, a potential gateway to the MOOCs. This site presents an overview of currently available courses from MITx, Coursera and Udacity and simply points you in the right direction. MITx hasn't really got started yet so the course list is still limited but the potential is clear. As the volume of open online courses grows someone has to try and tie it all together. What's missing with Class Central are all the courses available outside the MIT/Stanford sphere but it would help the movement if a reliable gateway site could be developed so that students would have a one-stop shop for open learning. I suspect someone is already working on this.