Saving Universities in the Era of MOOCs: How Service-Oriented Schools can Add Value in the Online Learning Boom

By Ted Curran. This past year has brought a massive amount of attention to Massive Open Online Courses, and much speculation about what they mean for traditional institutions of learning. The education and technology blogosphere have been breathlessly predicting the end of the world for traditional, brick-and-mortar universities and colleges as elite institutions like MIT, Stanford, Harvard and the University of California throw their weighty reputations behind low cost online courses from Udacity, Coursera, EdX, and Canvas Network. At the same time, sage edtech watchers like Audrey Watters and Michael Feldstein caution that we may be permanently dismantling much that is good in education as we try to keep up with the VC-funded race to give away high quality instruction for free to the masses. To understand the terrain we’re entering, it helps to talk about the value proposition that traditional schools have provided to students, and discuss how the new economics of online learning might disrupt that. More...