MOOCs and the Gartner Hype Cycle: A very slow tsunami

By Jonathan Tapson. A lot can change in a year. Twelve months ago, the traditional universities were doomed, condemned to irrelevance by an onslaught of MOOCs. Not every last one of them was going to die; Sebastian Thrun said that perhaps ten might survive. This was not very reassuring for the executives, staff, students, and alumni of the 20,000 universities which don’t fall into the top-10, when ranked according to the criterion: “Universities which will survive MOOCs.”  We haven’t yet seen this category in the Times Higher Ed rankings, but we are sure its appearance is imminent. One year later, it seems that, like Mark Twain’s, reports of these deaths are greatly exaggerated. In fact, as a Slate writer put it, “Anti-MOOC really is the new black.“  San Jose’s State University’s MOOCs-for-credit experiment has ended in qualified failure. There has been a plethora of articles and commentaries suggesting that the MOOCs were all just a bad dream, and we can go back to the chalkboard with a sigh of relief. More...