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Ellen N. Junn, provost and vice president for academic affairs at the university in San Jose, said the California State University System faces a crisis because more than 50 percent of entering students cannot meet basic requirements. “They graduate from high school, but they cannot pass our elementary math and English placement tests,” she said.

Recently edX completed a pilot offering of its difficult circuits and electronics course at San Jose State to stunning results: while 40 percent of the students in the traditional version of the class got a grade of C or lower, only 9 percent in the blended edX class got such a low grade.

Many professors teaching MOOCs had a similarly positive outlook: Asked whether they believe MOOCs "are worth the hype," 79 percent said yes.

Many of those surveyed felt that these free online courses should be integrated into the traditional system of credit and degrees. Two-thirds believe MOOCs will drive down the cost of earning a degree from their home institutions, and an overwhelming majority believe that the free online courses will make college less expensive in general.

John Owens was drawn to MOOCs because of their reach. He also did not want to be left behind.

If 2012 was the year of the MOOC, 2013 will be the year of the anti-MOOC.

There are many reasons to not like MOOCs (including the elite university models, poor pedagogy, blindness to decades of learning sciences research, and its entire identity: just a very bad name). The faculty response to MOOCs is particularly important. Almost every major MOOC initiative over the past 18 months has developed without the inclusion of the faculty voice.

The reason MOOCs are being classified as neoliberalist is because entrepreneurs see the changing landscape and have responded before many universities. Universities, in contrast, are actively trying to preserve their legacy models so as to stay relevant, or at minimum, stay in control. Something is not neoliberalist just because neoliberalists are the first to take advantage of the gaps created by the traditional and emerging shadow education systems. Don’t blame the ill motives of others for what was caused by inactivity on the part of the professoriate and higher education in general.

"There is no need for the university to own the online course you create," Mr. Nelson said, because a contract giving a college the right to use the course should suffice. In claiming ownership of a course, Mr. Nelson said, a higher-education institution asserts the right to update or revise the course as it sees fit, threatening the academic freedom of the course's creator.

"Being a professor will no longer be a professional career or a professional identity," and faculty members will instead essentially find themselves working in "a service industry,"

It also plans to publish a book, with boilerplate language for contracts and faculty handbooks, titled Recommended Principles to Guide University-Industry Relationships

“I think my boyfriend is jealous of how charmed I am by the professor,” wrote one of Mr. Zelikow’s students on a discussion thread devoted to his endearing smile.

As California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom said on a press call for the edX announcement, “The old educational financing model frankly is no longer sustainable.”

based on an unusually promising pilot course

Even edX President, Anant Agarwal, urged caution with the results. “I would not take this number to the bank,” he told me.

However, in times of massive social change like the transformation of America to an information economy, a commensurate transformation on the part of higher education is required. We are witnessing precisely that today. MOOCs, like the university itself or graduate education or technology institutes, are one element of the change. They may or may not persist or be recognizable in the future that unfolds. What does seem probable is this. As in the industrial era, the primary changes in higher education are unlikely to occur from within. Some institutions will certainly transform themselves as Harvard did after the Civil War, but the boldest innovations are likelier to come from outside or from the periphery of existing higher education, unencumbered by the need to slough off current practice. They may be not-for-profits, for-profits or hybrids. Names like Western Governors University, Coursera, and Udacity leap to mind. We are likely to see one or more new types of institution emerge.

In this era of change, traditional higher education—often criticized for being low in productivity, being high in cost, and making limited use of technology — will be under enormous pressure to change. Policy makers and investors are among those forces outside of education bringing that pressure to bear. It’s time for higher education to be equally aware and responsive.

Coursera has done an incredibly effective job harnessing this Presidential passion for press. Coursera – ‘the platform for offering “open” courses’ – has been very noisy about the fact that they only work with prestigious universities. What school doesn’t want to join the Stanford / Tecnológico de Monterrey / Princeton / École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne club? For the cost of offering one class in a new format, a President can officially put his or her institution in the same category as these “prestigious” schools. What Board of Trustees doesn’t want that?

1) Due to budget constraints, community colleges often do not have access to excellent online content

2) community colleges are often “commuter schools” where part-time students travel to the campus for classes and then go home. In the latter scenario, there’s far less opportunity for students to interact with the content and each other.

The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system