Online education has officially arrived. What five years ago was the ubiquitous domain of University of Phoenix, is now dominated by sexy start-ups like the recently announced edX by Harvard and MIT. The unprecedented boom of these education technology outfits has thrown the media into a tizzy about the coming of an education revolution. It certainly will happen, but there are some fundamental challenges it must tackle before it can disrupt and transform elite higher education. American higher education is a deeply entrenched system that is able to embrace innovation but has yet to be upended by it. MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, like Udacity and Coursera have the potential to be disruptive because they offer for free the same core assets that universities charge for: educational content and instruction. This de-commodification is critical and historic -- it democratizes knowledge and makes it available to anyone with Internet access. The scalability is limitless.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/8944/online-universities-the-future-of-elite-education
