Wooster Horizon Group

Presents a set of potential directions for MOOC evolution. 

Certainly a little different than what we've been saying. 

"Teacher Knows if You've Done the E-Reading"

"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."

"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."

The professor as/is a small business?

"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."