Wooster Horizon Group

"I'm not opposed to disruption; rather, I'm skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise: "paradigm-shifting" technology that improves university teaching and learning. The truth is, many of these start-ups clearly have no idea what actually works in higher ed and know little about the direction university teaching and learning have moved in the last 10 years, because they're trying to take us backward, not forward. Start-up and commercial tech are certainly proving disruptive-just in all the wrong ways."

"Rather than think about how "MOOCs" will influence liberal arts education, perhaps it is time to flip the question. What does traditional liberal arts education have to offer "MOOCs"? The answer remains the enduring value of education that produces critical thinkers, life-long learners and economically and politically contributing members of society. But in order to accomplish that feat, liberal arts education may have to take a lesson from MOOCs on how to generate excitement for the deployment of technology in service of inter-institutional and even international classrooms, information competency and problem-solving based courses.""

"America is shifting from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. Our social institutions, colleges and universities included, were created for the former. Today they all seem to be broken. They work less well than they once did. Through either repair or replacement - more likely a combination - they need to be refitted for a new age. Higher education underwent this kind of evolution in the past as the United States shifted from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The classical agrarian college, imported from 17th-century England with a curriculum rooted in the Middle Ages, was established to educate a learned clergy to govern the colonies. This model held sway until the early 19th century."

"But thus far little attention has been paid to the quality of MOOCs. Quality in online learning can be defined in many ways: quality of content, quality of design, quality of instructional delivery, and, ultimately, quality of outcomes."

"While MOOC providers regularly cite compelling examples and testimonials from students in far-flung locations who have benefited from their courses, examples of possible endemic disconnects span the world: from educators in Africa who prefer to create their own content rather than rely on exports from the United States to American Indians who, even within the United States, lack access to the reliable Internet connection necessary to enroll in online courses."