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The model is fundamentally different, however, than any other adult bachelor programs that you’ve heard of. Students will pay a flat subscription fee of $2,250 for three month’s of “all you can eat” access. During that time. they’ll be able to use the school’s instructional content online, its advisors, and other resources. More importantly, they’ll be welcome to try to pass as many “competency tests” as they want.

“We are in essence creating a virtual university--a new one,” says Ray Cross, Chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension. “What is a full-time student in a self-paced competency-based model? Well, we’ve got to define that.”

Only 10 students will be accepted for each degree program in January 2014, but as the program expands, Cross says the “sky is the limit,” especially given how many students are open to self-taught online courses around the world.

Could Khan Academy be falling into the same trap as other tech innovations that best serve a better educated and affluent population?

Sometimes potentially “disruptive” approaches to higher education arrive on campuses with little fanfare. And they can become solid additions to traditional colleges rather than an existential threat. Take Kentucky’s two-year college system, which three years ago began an online offering aimed at working adults. The project, dubbed “Learn on Demand,” hits most of the buzzwords du jour, featuring modular courses that lead to stackable credentials, with both self-paced and competency-based elements. All that’s missing is a MOOC.

Roughly 1,000 students are enrolled in Learn on Demand at any one time, according to officials at the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. Many heard about it by word of mouth, and a growing number of the system’s 33,000 online students have been attracted to the convenience of the classes, which can be broken into modules that take as little as three weeks to complete.

online competency-based education stands out as the innovation most likely to disrupt higher education.

As traditional institutions struggle to innovate from within and other education technology vendors attempt to plug and play into the existing system, online competency-based providers release learning from the constraints of the academy. By breaking down learning into competencies—not by courses or even subject matter—these providers can cost-effectively combine modules of learning into pathways that are agile and adaptable to the changing labor market.

The fusion of modularization with mastery-based learning is the key to understanding how these providers can build a multitude of stackable credentials or programs for a wide variety of industries, scale them, and simultaneously drive down the cost of educating students for the opportunities at hand. These programs target a growing set of students who are looking for a different value proposition from higher education—one that centers on targeted and specific learning outcomes, tailored support, as well as identifiable skillsets that are portable and meaningful to employers.

ought to write a companion book -- a sequel to The End of College -- called The End of Sex. The argument would go like this: Disruptive innovations in virtual technologies everywhere are rendering residential sex obsolete. Match.com is clearly more efficient than old, clumsy courtship rituals, and improved algorithms will obviate the need entirely for bar hopping. Virtual sex is disease-free and quantifiable. Advancements in robotics, tactile interactivity, customizable AI, and neuro-scientific sensory mapping are all conspiring to supplant old-school face-to-face sexuality. Virtual sex is market-friendly and doesn't rely on unfair status credentials. Carey will probably make good money if he puts forth The End of Sex book, and he'll be able to laugh at stodgy PhDs all the way to the bank.

discounts the value of face-to-face human relations and overlooks the inherent (and irreplaceable) joy of such encounters. Many (we'd say most) professors and students do what they do, not because they are motivated primarily by status or job concerns, but because they love learning and learning with others.

While MOOCS are hardly a step forward pedagogically, they have brought distance learning out of the shadows and into daily discourse about the future of higher education.

The lines between for-profit and not-for-profit are blurring as partnerships evolve between community colleges offering two-year diplomas and for-profit colleges awarding the bachelor’s degree. For-profit corporations now provide the platform and technical know-how for expanding the reach of not-for-profit master’s programs at many major universities.

Educational technologies will need to be employed for building new models of learning