Education Commons^™

The Merchants Of Moocs, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

A loose network of educators, entrepreneurs, and investors are promoting Massive Open Online Courses as an innovation that will radically disrupt higher education. These Merchants of MOOCs see MOOCs' novel features—star professors, flipped classrooms, economies of scale, unbundling, and openness—as the key to dramatically improving higher education while reducing its cost.But MOOCs are far from unprecedented. There is very little in them that has not been tried before, from 19th-century correspondence courses to Fathom, Columbia's $25 million dot-com boondoggle. Claims of disruption look rather different when this missing context is restored. This essay examines some common arguments about what gives …