Who Takes MOOCs? For online higher education, the devil is in the data

By Brandon Alcorn, Gayle Christensen, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel. Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, represent one of the most momentous—and contentious—changes to higher education in decades. But the debate over the free Internet classes has been a conspicuously fact-free zone. While techno-utopians tout MOOCs’ potential to topple barriers to college educations for disadvantaged people worldwide and skeptics warn of the downsides to automated instruction, neither side has been able to point to reliable data to support its claims. More...