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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.

For instance, they may offer more breaks during classroom lectures, because they discovered through the online courses that a student's attention span is about 15 minutes.

Richard Boyatzis of CWRU'S Weatherhead School of Management is incorporating aspects from his online “Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence” into his classroom courses. He said that in the future the time it takes for a graduate student to get a degree could be reduced, saving thousands in tuition, by combining the best of online learning with classroom teaching.

More than 58,000 logged on once or more to participate, he said.

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.

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.

After six months of high-profile experimentation, San Jose State University plans to “pause” its work with Udacity, a company that promises to deliver low-cost, high-quality online education to the masses.

San Jose State Provost Ellen Junn said disappointing student performance will prompt the university to stop offering online classes with Udacity this fall as part of a "short breather." Junn wants to spend the fall going over the results and talking with faculty members about the university’s online experimentation, which extends beyond the Udacity partnership and has proved somewhat controversial. She said the plan is to start working with Udacity again in spring 2014.

Preliminary findings from the spring semester suggest students in the online Udacity courses, which were developed jointly with San Jose State faculty, do not fare as well as students who attended normal classes -- though Junn cautioned against reading too much into the comparison, given the significant differences in the student populations.

Veronica: one we move away from institutional limitations, all kinds of limitations – payment, platform, credit – then we can focus on what works best – and then we can look at things like disaggregation of the course, modularization of the course, etc. Michael: sure, one of the greatest services MOOCs have provided has been to reawaken the imagination. Let’s invest in trying some things, lift some constraints and see what happens. Phil: It’s already having an impact. It’s really people rethink and get past the Carnegie unit, the seat time.

There was a cluster of high-use countries and then a massive tail. Canada, Colombia, Greece, the UK, Poland – these were the high-use countries. Now students in these countries have a peer group of unprecedented size.

We had representatives in our course from 194 countries – they didn’t all interact in every part of the course, but imagine how the instructor felt

We anecdotally observed that students are continuing to participate in the discussion forums nearly a year after the course has finished. So we can ask of LMSs whether we should be allowing students to participate after the course has been completed.

Offering MOOCs through edX is hardly free. There are options available to institutions that want to build their own courses on the edX platform at no charge, but for partners who want help developing their courses, edX charges a base rate of $250,000 per course, then $50,000 for each additional time that course is offered; edX also takes a cut of any revenue the course generates.

In the debate at Amherst, which boasts a $1.64-billion endowment, money was no object, and the faculty committee devoted to weighing the pros and cons of joining edX did not seem worried about MOOCs as a distraction to teaching and service.

On a larger scale, MOOCs might create a "new and different kind of competition" that could jeopardize more-vulnerable colleges, if not Amherst itself; they could "enable the centralization of American higher education" and "create the conditions for the obsolescence of the B.A. degree."

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX,

take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers