The advantages of MOOCs, says Chew, are low cost and flexibility. “You can take a course anytime, anywhere,” he says, “as long as you have an Internet connection.”The Internet, says Grim, connects MOOCs students in other ways.“Students can organize online discussion boards,” she says. “They can get together with each other and ask questions and figure things out on their own. In the process they can get to know people all over the world.”MOOCs have caused “great turbulence” in American higher education, Chew and Grim conclude in their paper, and could soon do so in other countries.“With the open environment of the Internet, and the large profits that can possibly be made using MOOCs as an inexpensive alternative to higher education,” they write, “it is just a matter of time before the effects currently being felt in the U.S. spread throughout the world.”“I don’t really think MOOCS will be a revolution,” says Chew, “but universities will definitely need to keep an eye on MOOCS, how [this] evolves and how it can affect our current mode of teaching.”

The big insight in the first MOOCs was that by chunking the video, by making it just a few minutes long and making it semi synchronous — that is, available on demand during a week of the course — you get a much greater adoption and viewing of that video as opposed to, for instance, having to take a video cassette out of a library, check it out, take it home, plug it in, fast forward to the right section. That friction substantially diminished the usefulness of video when it was first introduced.

But I also have to point out that there is a fair bit of waste in what we do in the classroom. That has to do with the fact that different students learn at different rates. When a student struggles on the MOOC, they can just rewind or they can just read something and then catch up, whereas in the classroom, you’re constrained by a common pace with everyone. So you really do gain efficiency.