Indeed, the future is so clearly one of universal access to free, high-quality, impeccably branded online courses that their presence can be simply assumed. The interesting questions now revolve around financing, quality assurance, and—most important—credit. At the moment, colleges have a monopoly on the sale of college credits, the only units of learning that can be assembled into credentials with wide acceptance in the labor market. Monopolies are valuable things to control, and monopolists tend not to relinquish them voluntarily. But the MOOC explosion will accelerate the breakup of the college credit monopoly.
http://chronicle.com/article/Into-the-Future-With-MOOCs/134080/
