“Neither the idea of the traditional university nor the MOOC vision of universal access to education is new. Both promise to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge in some fashion, and both operate on a hierarchical business model where students are consumers, tiered faculty are human resources, and administrators solicit and redistribute the funds that govern the organization. Though they share organizational features, and therefore some of the same top-down management flaws, each presents unique problems and paradigms.”
Article at Hybrid Pedagogy. I do agree with most of the article – while I do not expect that MOOCs are the answer (and very similar open education has been available for years from MIT Courseware, etc.) I do think the shift and the discussion surrounding it might be the push we needed for whatever the next generation of higher education looks like.
New Images of Education 