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"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

RPI professor Jim Hendler, who was recognized by Playboy Magazine as “one of the nation’s most influential and imaginative college professors” who are “reinventing the classroom,”2 talked about how he struggled to flip his classroom in a way that his students would embrace and lamented that he had no training in pedagogy.

Enter the MOOC In some ways, the xMOOC in its current form is this trend to turn the course into an artifact taken to its logical conclusion (possibly ad absurdum). Course lectures are now artifacts in the form of videos. Assignment and assessment functions are packaged into machine-graded tools. Certification of knowledge is provided by the machines as well. Yes, there are still class discussions, and yes, the course instructors do participate sometimes, but they appear to be rather secondary in most of the xMOOC course designs I have looked at. In general, xMOOCs tend to explore the degree to which the pedagogical function can be fulfilled by artifacts.

The sentiment articulated by some of the ELI webinar participants, which was echoed by a presentation at this week’s MOOC colloquium at RPI, is that xMOOCs don’t tend to be able to get at deep skill acquisition because students have limited opportunities to either see those skills modeled for them or to practice them.

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.

Here’s what Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor and chair of media studies at the University of Virginia, said about this concern last summer: “For the more pedestrian MOOCs, the simple podium lecture captured and released, the difference between a real college course and a MOOC is like the difference between playing golf and watching golf. Both can be exciting and enjoyable. Both can be boring and frustrating. But they are not the same thing.”

Mills Kelly, whose new book Teaching History in the Digital Age looks fantastic, is such a skeptic, writing the following in a thoughtful blog post last summer about teaching online: “We should be thinking carefully about how teaching and learning in the digital realm is different. Then, and only then, should we start creating new approaches to teaching and learning. BlackBoard and its ilk won’t help us. MOOCs won’t help us either.”

Vanderbilt’s first two MOOCs came online last month, each with about 20,000 active student participants, it’s become clear to me that MOOCs have great potential for expanding the educational missions of colleges and universities. These students aren’t paying tuition and they aren’t earning credit, but they are interested in learning