Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead - Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses? That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations. “The very notion of a ‘class’ may be outdated,” the report argues. That line appears in the context of online courses, but one of the report’s authors, Sanjay Sarma, who leads MIT’s experiments with massive open online courses, said in an email interview that the sentiment could apply to in-person settings as well. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/are-courses-outdated-mit-considers-offering-modules-instead/54257