Online Learning: Will Technology Transform Higher Education? - Jamie Beckett, Stanford Engineering

“MOOCs could be to higher education what Napster was to the music industry,” said Girod, referring to the music-sharing system that created a seismic shift in how music is purchased and consumed. ”Online technologies have repeatedly enabled an unbundling, which disrupted the respective industries and their traditional business models. Mitchell Stevens, an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford, said the move to online education is driven not by technology but by factors like contracting state budgets, which put pressure on many colleges to reduce costs at the same time they are facing growing scrutiny around performance. “The digital revolution is a match igniting a large terrain of dry ground,’’ he said. One implication of digital educational delivery mechanisms, he said, is that they provide college educators the ability to measure and improve performance. http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/online-learning-will-technology-transform-higher-education