Yes, MOOC is the global higher education game changer

By Simon Marginson. Free Massive Open Online Courseware – MOOC – is less than a year old but it is already clear this will be the game changer in higher education worldwide. Right now it is reverberating through the world’s universities like a tectonic shock.
The new paradigm, first developed in the northern autumn of 2011 by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig (pictured) at Stanford University alongside Silicon Valley in California, will be as disruptive to conventional delivery in higher education as the internet is proving in terms of disrupting book publishers, newspapers, and stores such as Myer and David Jones. Thrun’s first programme in artificial intelligence quickly enrolled 160,000 students. His crucial innovation was not free courseware, which was a concept that was 10 years old, but online grading in multiple choice format, with certification at the end of the programme.