They are basically graduate certificates, which are a normal university thing. You take 3-5 graduate courses, they give you a certificate saying that you did this, you give them money. Not a full blown masters, thus the micromasters branding, but it can open the door to changing a career or entering a specialization.
I dunno, giving people who might not be able to afford a masters otherwise or aren’t able to move away for two years an opportunity to get half a masters degree from home seems like a pretty big deal to me.
i don't know if that's "less" or "more" than a graduate certificate. Certificates don't usually give you half the credits toward a masters program at the same university, do they?
I can see this being great "marketing" for the university too though -- once you got the "micromasters", the only way to get half your credits toward a degree is to go to the same university that gave you the micromasters (if you can get accepted, they took your money for the micromasters without promising that) -- they've kind of locked you in.
Micromasters is a trademarked credential. Each of the different online learning platforms has their own, normally leaning on/leeching off established and recognised credentials as in this case the Masters. They could have made it an entire category, open to use by others and instead chose to TM it.
> i had never heard the phrase "micromasters". Wikipedia suggests it is unique to EdX.
Coursera has something similar called MasterTrack; there's not a generic cross-platform name for it, though if it is successful for multiple platforms and graduate institutions that will probably change over time.