The Hype Cycle is pretty straightforward. It suggests that each new technology goes through five phases: a) the Technology Trigger, b) the Peak of Inflated Expectations, c) the Trough of Disillusionment, d) the Slope of Enlightenment, and finally e) the Plateau of Productivity. (Folks, they’re consultants, they can’t help talking like that.)

Some questions we need to ask in terms of MOOCs are: Are MOOCs going to go through the full Hype Cycle? For every example of a technology which underwent this cycle, the skeptic can quote an example of a technology which went through the Peak of Inflated Expectations and then vanished without a trace. (Insofar as anything ever vanishes without a trace — there are still obscure but intense academic conferences on Optical Computing, for example.) If we are on the cycle, in which phase are we, and how fast will the cycle unfold? How should traditional universities, and traditional academics, respond to this progress?

Are MOOCs going to go through the full Hype Cycle?

Eleanor Saitta, a professional paranoid, has said: “When the Internet encounters an institution, it eviscerates it. Then it replaces it with something that looks very like the Internet.”

Paul Graham Raven elaborated on this remark, “This has already happened to the music industry, and it’s currently happening to journalism and publishing.

Clay Shirky, in perhaps the best article on the whole subject to date, is not polite: “MOOCs are a lightning strike on a rotten tree.”

Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen

published “Disrupting Class: How the internet will change the way the world learns.” This was the first time Christensen moved from analyzing past innovation to predicting a future disruption, and he left a deep impression on most readers.

Why wouldn’t the Internet eviscerate traditional universities? Do traditional universities have some magical protection that newspapers, music distributors, travel agents, advertising, banking, booksellers, matchmaking, photographic agencies, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, and thousands of other eviscerated industries didn’t have?

every mainstream article on why MOOCs won’t work, and almost all of them focus on the same two flawed arguments.

The first is that you can’t get a high quality student-teacher or student-peer interaction on the Web.

if you consider that one out of every eight minutes of global online activity is currently spent on Facebook, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that the socially interactive component of traditional education is going to defend it from online offerings.

The second flawed argument is that MOOCs have terrible completion rates, and therefore are not effective substitutes for real education. Quoted completion rates for MOOCs courses range from 5 percent to 16 percent.

But does it matter?

A small percentage of a very large number is still a large number — when 14 percent of the 160,000 students who signed up for Udacity’s “Introduction to Programming” passed, that added up to 23,000 completions.

if we added up all the students who had ever completed this common freshman course, at all those universities, over their entire histories, it would be unlikely to exceed 10,000 completions. Udacity managed this in three months, with a staff of less than a dozen, and on a budget that wouldn’t get my School’s financial manager excited.

Nonetheless, the non-completion of the course carries almost zero cost. There was no enrolment fee; nobody relocated cities to attend; I imagine no-one left their jobs to study (in fact, we can be certain that an awful lot of people sat under their bosses’ gaze at their office workstations, looking industrious, while they studied); and neither successful nor unsuccessful students were left with crushing study loan debt. Given the massive differences in volume, cost and convenience, comparing MOOCs and traditional delivery on the single critierion of completion rates is not really meaningful.

Where are we on the Hype Cycle?

The shape of this curve suggests that we are at, or past, the peak and about to enter the trough. Problems will start to be felt in the traditional sector when the curve turns upward from the trough, although any plans to deal with it ought to be in place long before then. So, when does the storm hit us?

The Very Slow Tsunami

MOOCs vs. traditional is not a sprint race; it is a marathon. The school leavers of 2013 are not going to go the MOOCs route. They can’t. As of this writing, there is no MOOCs undergraduate degree program, and only one sort-of-MOOC Master’s degree. They are going to commit into three, four and five year academic programs, and they will be locked in to the traditional route thereafter.

The school leavers of 2014 are going to have some MOOCs degree options to choose from. It’s a big life decision — who’s going to jump first? Certainly not the wealthy kids, who can afford Harvard. And as we all know, the wealthy kids tend to define which are the fashionable options. The first MOOCs adopters will be the kids and families for whom “free” is a compelling argument.

Don’t forget, though, that within the last year we have adopted a new way of referring to this demographic: the 99 percent.

The kids of 2015 will not have seen any successful MOOCs graduates yet — certainly not successful in the career sense — but it will be a tempting option, and some of them will jump.

This is the very slow tsunami of the title — a gradual but inexorably rolling change in societal and professional attitudes, pinned at one end by the bedrock certainty that the elite institutions produce the elite people, and pulled at the other end by the growing awareness that free isn’t necessarily junk, and it’s, well, free. It will take 10 or 20 years, and be imperceptible while it happens, like boiling a frog. When did newspapers actually die? I’m not sure, but Fairfax Media made 2000 people redundant last July, so perhaps it’s a death which is still in progress.

Harvard and Cambridge are safe, forever,

For the mid-range institutions, there is probably a happy 10-year window in which they are safe and can continue in blissful ignorance.

Given that almost every senior university executive I have ever met has less than 10 years to go to retirement, don’t bet your life that they will take this problem seriously (we call this the “horizon problem” — an executive’s outlook extends only as far as a horizon defined by his or her retirement date, plus six months).

Assuming that you’re an academic and you weren’t planning to retire in the next decade, what then? There’s no simple answer to that; however, knowing that your institution is not going to die next year, but will probably become terminally ill in the next decade, should both sharpen your thoughts and give you some time to develop some strategies for co-existing with the MOOCs.

Are MOOCs going to go through the full Hype Cycle?