Oxford University was founded in 1096, Cambridge in 1209. Harvard, a relative newcomer, was founded in 1636. Other than religions, few institutions appear to have maintained their existence or their relative status for as long as major universities. And few institutions, notably again other than religions, have seen so little change. Oxford in 2012 teaches students in ways remarkably similar to Oxford in 1096, seated students listening to professors in a classroom.

I suspect that these two facts are related; stasis in methods has led to stasis in status. And I suspect that both of these facts are about to change. Online education will change how universities teach; as a result, online education will change which universities teach.

Advantages of Online Education

I see three principle advantages to online education, 1) leverage, especially of the best teachers; 2) time savings; 3) individualized teaching and new technologies.

Leverage

The importance of leverage was brought home to me by a personal anecdote. In 2009, I gave a TED talk on the economics of growth. Since then my 15 minute talk has been watched nearly 700,000 times. That is far fewer views than the most-watched TED talk, Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk on how schools kill creativity, which has been watched some 26 million times. Nonetheless, the 15 minutes of teaching I did at TED dominates my entire teaching career: 700,000 views at 15 minutes each is equivalent to 175,000 student-hours of teaching, more than I have taught in my entire offline career.[1] Moreover, the ratio is likely to grow because my online views are increasing at a faster rate than my offline students.

Teaching students 30 at a time is expensive and becoming relatively more expensive. Teaching is becoming relatively more expensive for the same reason that butlers have become relatively more expensive–butler productivity increased more slowly than productivity in other fields, so wages for butlers rose even as their output stagnated; as a result, the opportunity cost of butlers increased. The productivity of teaching, measured in, say, kilobytes transmitted from teacher to student per unit of time, hasn’t increased much. As a result, the opportunity cost of teaching has increased, an example of what’s known as Baumol’s cost disease. Teaching has remained economic only because the value of each kilobyte transmitted has increased due to discoveries in (some) other fields. Online education, however, dramatically increases the productivity of teaching. As my experience with TED indicates, it’s now possible for a single professor to teach more students in an afternoon than was previously possible in a lifetime.

The counter-argument is that there is an ineffable quality of the classroom experience that raises its value well above the same material taught online. Even after many years of teaching, however, what exactly this quality might be remains ineffable to me. Actually, that is not quite fair. Bringing the most advanced students in any field up to the cutting edge of knowledge and beyond has always required a kind of apprenticeship rather than a more straightforward communication of data/knowledge. Fields with greater physicality, not just sports and dance, but also experimental biology, physics, and chemistry will also require more in-classroom teaching with greater attention from a human being. Even recognizing these exceptions, however, still leaves the vast majority of teaching open to massive productivity increases. Until late college, physics is mostly teaching knowledge known since Newton. Most of the mathematics known or needed by most people has not advanced much beyond Euclid and Pythagoras, let alone Euler. No one expects online education to substitute for apprenticing to a master, but much education at the college level is already mass education taught not by a master but by an adjunct.

For the sake of argument, however, let us accept that classroom teaching has some special value. We must still weigh this value against the productivity increases (and thus the cost decreases) potentially available from online education. The majority of my teaching comes from my 15 minute TED talk, but the vast majority of the cost comes from the minority of offline teaching. The 700,000 viewers of my TED talk were charged nothing, but the far smaller group of people who have taken my offline classes were charged, along with the taxpayers, upwards of a million dollars.[2] With these cost ratios, one imagines that many students would appreciate the option of a lower-cost product even if quality were somewhat lower. Quality, however, need not be lower with online education. Quality can increase by increasing the number of students taught by the best teachers and by substituting substantial capital for labor in teaching.

The best way to increase the quality of teaching is to increase the number of students taught by the best teachers. Online education leverages the power of the best teachers, allowing them to teach many more students. Moreover, online education means that we also see the best at their best. I won’t comment on my teaching quality but what I can say without fear of dispute is that the 15 minutes of teaching in my TED talk was among the best 15 minutes of my career. Knowing the potential size of the TED audience, I honed my talk and visuals with months of practice. I’d rather be judged by my best 15 minutes than by my average 15 minutes. My offline students get my average 15 minutes; my online students get my best 15 minutes.

Teaching today is like a stage play. A play can be seen by at most a few hundred people at a single sitting and it takes as much labor to produce the 100th viewing as it does to produce the first. As a result, plays are expensive. Online education makes teaching more like a movie. Movies can be seen by millions and the cost per viewer declines with more viewers. Now consider quality. The average movie actor is a better actor than the average stage actor. If you were making a movie with a potential audience in the millions wouldn’t you hire the best actors? With more viewers it also makes sense to substitute capital for labor, adding special effects, scenery, music and other quality improvements resulting in a movie experience unlike any that can be created on stage. Is there something ineffably great about a live performance? Occasionally, but the greatest stage performances are seen by only a handful of people.

The parallel between movies and plays and online and offline education has further lessons. First, the market for teachers will become more like the market for actors, a winner-take-all market with greater inequality and very big payments at the top. A principal player on Broadway might earn $62,500 a year, perhaps twice what a minor player might earn.[3] One of the biggest stars in the world, Julia Roberts, made $35,000 a week, or $1.62 million in a 50-week year performing in Three Days of Rain. Nevertheless, her stage salary pales in comparison to her typical payment of $10–$20 million per movie for much less work. Bigger markets support larger salaries, so the best teachers will earn much more in an online world.

Second, movies are better in many respects than plays, but no one doubts that a taped play is worse in all respects than a live play. Many of the early online forays into education were simply taped lectures, boring, flat, and worse than the same in-class lecture. To take full advantage of the online format, an online lecture has to be different from an in-class lecture. Different mediums demand different messaging. I turn to some of these differences now.

Time Savings

Tyler Cowen and I have created a new online education platform, MRUniversity.com, short for Marginal Revolution University, after our blog of that name. In putting together our first course, Development Economics, we were surprised to discover that we could teach a full course in less than half the lecture time of an offline course. A large part of the difference is that online lectures need not be repetitive.

Dale Carnegie’s advice to “tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said” makes sense for a live audience. If 20% of your students aren’t following the lecture, it’s natural to repeat some of the material so that you keep the whole audience involved and following your flow. But if you repeat whenever 20% of the audience doesn’t understand something, that means that 80% of the audience hear something twice that they only needed to hear once. Highly inefficient.

Carnegie’s advice is dead wrong for an online audience. Different medium, different messaging. In an online lecture it pays to be concise. Online, the student is in control and can choose when and what to repeat. The result is a big time-savings as students proceed as fast as their capabilities can take them, repeating only what they need to further their individual understanding.

We get even more savings by eliminating the fixed time-costs of attending class. Before I even begin my lecture, many of my students will have driven half an hour just to attend the class, followed by another half an hour to get home. And with online lectures there is no looking for parking! Combining these savings with more concise lectures and we get big time savings.

Time Shifting

As with a play, offline teaching requires that every customer consumes at the exact moment that the supplier produces. As with a movie, online education is consumed and produced more flexibly. In the online world, consumers need not each consume at the same time, and suppliers need not produce at the moment of consumption.

It’s costly to coordinate consumers and suppliers, and the increase in cost reduces the amount of education consumed. I teach a class at George Mason University, 7:20–10 pm on Tuesday nights. I suspect that this is not the preferred time to learn for any of my students, and it’s certainly not the preferred time for me to teach; it’s merely the best time to coordinate me and as many students as possible.

The inflexibility of offline teaching also reduces the quality of teaching and of learning. Despite caffeination, by 9:30 pm fatigue sets in, and my teaching quality begins to fall. I am not as sharp at 9:30 pm as at 7:30 pm, and neither are my students. As the quality of both sender and receiver declines, less is communicated. As a result, it makes little sense for me to try to teach complex ideas after 9:30 pm. I try to structure my class to accommodate, but sometimes it’s not possible and I end up either teaching less or teaching less well.

Supermarkets are open 24 hours a day, why shouldn’t universities be? In fact, Marginal Revolution University is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Learning on demand. Flexible time scheduling reduces the costs of coordination and also allows students to optimize learning effectiveness by choosing the best time for learning.

Online education can also break the artificial lecture length of 50–90 minutes. Many teaching experts say that adult attention span is 10–15 minutes in a lecture, with many suggesting that attention span has declined in the Internet era.[4] A good professor can refocus the attention of motivated students over longer periods. Nevertheless, it is clear that the standard lecture length has not been determined by optimal learning time but by the high fixed costs of traveling to school. Lower the fixed costs and lectures will evolve to a more natural level, probably between 5–20 minutes of length—perhaps not coincidentally the natural length of a lecture is probably not that different from the length of a typical popular music track or television segment.

Individualized Teaching and New Technologies

A common objection to online education is that the classroom experience provides greater opportunity for personalized learning. In some cases this is true, but the offline experience is often not a classroom of 4-9 students, but a classroom of over 100. At Virginia Tech, classes of 100-plus students are not uncommon, and one freshman course in geography has some 2,700 students.[5] Virginia Tech is not unusual.

Virginia Tech. From http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/07/educators-hear-advice-how-teach-large-courses.

The conventional wisdom is that the classroom allows for more questions. The truth, however, is that the online space is a better place both for asking questions and for interacting with professors and other students. Put aside that students from all over the world can ask questions online. The problem is that a classroom lecture is constrained by the costs of coordination to begin and end at a time fixed in advance. If every student in a class of 50 asked one question per lecture there would be no time for the lecture. In contrast, questions can be asked at any time in an online lecture, and they do not impede the lecture. Moreover, in the online world there are more resources to answer questions. Answers to last year’s questions, for example, can be used to answer this year’s questions. More importantly, the online world makes it easier for peer-learning, for students to answer their own questions. At MRUniversity we have provided tools such as voting on questions and answers that we hope will allow for more peer-learning and peer-teaching. Hence our motto: Learn, Teach and Share.

Questions are also more powerful in the online world. Consider how much difference is made by the simple possibility of review. Review means that the teacher is held to a higher standard. If I make an error in my offline class, chances are no one will catch it. If I make an error in an online class, a student will invariably catch it. (Knowing this I am more careful in my online class.)

Technology is rapidly changing how much interaction can occur online. The future is lectures plus intelligent, on the fly assessment. The GRE, for example, is a computer-adaptive test—when you answer questions correctly you get a harder question; when you answer incorrectly you get an easier question. The adaptive nature of the test makes it possible to zero in more quickly on true ability. The future of online education is adaptive assessment, not for testing, but for learning. Incorrect answers are not random but betray specific assumptions and patterns of thought. Analysis of answers, therefore, can be used to guide students to exactly that lecture that needs to be reviewed and understood to achieve mastery of the material. Computer-adaptive testing will thus become computer-adaptive learning.

Computer-adaptive learning will be as if every student has their own professor on demand—much more personalized than one professor teaching 500 students or even 50 students. In his novel Diamond Age, science fiction author Neal Stephenson describes a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that can answer a learner’s questions with specific information and also teach young children with allegories tuned to the child’s environment and experience. In short, something like an iPad combining Siri, Watson, and the gaming technology behind an online world like Skyrim. Surprisingly, the computer will make learning less standardized and robotic.

In Diamond Age, the very first Illustrated Primer is created by a billionaire for use by his own child, but within a decade only slightly less functional devices are made available to millions. Online education has the potential to break the cost disease by substituting capital for labor and hitching productivity improvements in education to productivity improvements in software, artificial intelligence, and computing.

Productivity in education has lagged productivity in other sectors of the economy because teaching is so labor intensive. Where exactly in the typical classroom is there room for investment, let alone productivity improvement? More chalk? Prior to online education, the bottleneck though which productivity improvements had to pass was the teacher, and we know that improving teacher productivity is very difficult, which is why teaching methods haven’t changed in millennia. Online education vastly increases the potential for productivity increases because it greatly increases the size of the potential market. Bigger markets increase the incentive to research and develop new products (coincidentally the very topic of my TED talk.) A tool used to improve online education–an interface, an algorithm, a new teaching method–can be applied very widely, potentially world-wide, thus greatly increasing the incentive to invest in the education sector, perhaps the most important sector of the 21st century economy.

Educational productivity will also increase with online education because online education is inherently data-rich. Every video watched, every link clicked, every question answered or not answered, all can easily be collected and analyzed. Randomized controlled trials, which are very expensive in the offline world, become very cheap in the online world. Consider two methods of teaching a concept. Which works best? In the offline world, a randomized controlled trial might involve 50 students. In the online world, we can randomly assign one of two videos to thousands of students and then monitor their performance days or weeks later on exams or other material. Online education will allow us to learn about what works much more quickly than in the past.

Online education will also dramatically shorten the time from learning what works to implementing what works. Once again, scale and leverage are key. In the online world, the best teachers will teach more students, but that leverage also means that better teaching methods can diffuse through fewer teachers to more students much more rapidly. In the limit, educational improvements will occur with a download in the same way that my DVR player periodically updates its operating software.

The College Experience

The college experience is about much more than learning. Online education will not replace the two Olympic-sized swimming pools at my university, the modern exercise facilities, the coffee shop, or the restaurants. At many institutions, online education will not replace but instead will supplement and complement the traditional college experience. “Flipping the classroom”—viewing online lectures at home and doing “homework” in-class—is one approach. More generally, many institutions will be able to raise the quality and breadth of the classes that they offer. Not every university can afford world-class lecturers in development economics, the history of Croatia, or pop art, but more universities will be able to offer such courses by supplementing their own lecturers with online offerings.

The university will continue to be a place for young people to socialize and mate, but when the shroud of education is lifted, the socialization and education functions will become more distinct. As socialization and education are unbundled, parents and taxpayers may decide that they would rather not pay for four five years of socialization when cheaper means of education are available.

It’s important to understand that already today the “college experience” is experienced by only a minority of students. Say “college student” and the image may be of a young person just out of high school living in a dorm pursuing a four year degree with few financial constraints. The reality is that more than a third of college students are over the age of 25, nearly half are enrolled part-time, and most are working. About one quarter of college students have children of their own! The traditional college experience does not meet the needs of most of today’s students.[6]

Online Education Has Already Met the Market Test

Online education hit the radar of the educational elite only recently with the unexpected success of Stanford’s free online course on artificial intelligence. Taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun in 2011, this course enrolled more students than the entire Stanford student body. Educational startups like Coursera, Udacity and, of course, MRUniversity promoted the idea of MOOCs, massive online open courses. The elites, however, have been behind the curve. In 2011, even before the rise of MOOCs, there were 2.75 million online students, 12% of the headcount at degree-granting schools. [7]

Private, for-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix and Ashford University were the pioneers of online education. The for-profits offered courses that appealed to women, particularly those with children, to ethnic minorities and to adults 25–44 years old who valued all of the flexibility and time-savings that online education offered. Online education has also been especially successful in the graduate market, particularly for the Master’s degree, which is shorter and pursued by adults less interested in the socializing and mating functions of the traditional college—indeed, today the Master’s degree is already more than 30% online.[8]

By selling (and marketing) to an audience that traditional universities had mostly ignored, the for-profits increased market share tremendously in the 2000s. Questions about quality and large subsidies from taxpayer funds have plagued the for-profits, but we should not mistake the messenger for the message. Online education has already met the market test.

Online Education and the Developing World

The shift to online education is happening at the same time as the developing world is increasing education at a dramatic rate. Over the next 15 years or so India plans to increase the number of students attending university from 12 million to over 30 million; a goal that will require at least 1,000 new universities. China has already increased the number of entering university students from 1 million in 1998 to over 6 million today. Now consider, will the developing world adopt the Oxford model of 1096 or the newly emerging online model? It’s a good bet that for reasons of scale, speed, and quality the developing world will adopt the online model.

The Great Unbundling

Traditional universities combine course development, delivery, assessment, and credentialing. Online education makes it clear that these categories can be unbundled. Most of the MOOCs are currently offered for free with no credential, but institutions such as Western Governor’s University and Colorado University are beginning to credential courses produced from outside of their institutions. It’s possible to imagine an education system in which degrees are assembled from many sources and many institutions offer credentials based on various types of assessment. Already many universities now offer credit for courses taken at other universities, and in some systems, such as Australia’s, simultaneous cross-institutional enrollment is standard.

Unbundling development from the other functions means greater economies of scale. Unbundling assessment offers the possibility of proof of knowledge without taking a class. We already have some experience with unbundling credentialing in the market for lawyers where law schools train students who must then pass the bar.
Conclusions

Technology is disrupting the market for education just as it has disrupted the market for news. We do not yet know how the industry will shake out, but a few points can be made with confidence. Online education offers tremendous savings both in terms of money and of time. Online education will also increase the quality of education for many but not all courses, especially as investment in complementary technologies increases. The for-profit universities have already moved heavily into online education and the non-profits are poised to follow. What is less clear is who will be delivering the online content of the future, how knowledge will be assessed, and how learning will be credentialed.

We should also not count the old model out. Having never observed an alternative, we may not yet fully appreciate the old model’s strengths. The Oxford model weathered previous technological storms, not the least of which was the printed book. Nevertheless, the disruption potential is peaking now.

Notes

[1]I estimate a total of 54,000 student hours of offline teaching. A typical course is 45 student hours, at 2 courses per semester, 2 semesters per year with 30 students per course and 10 years of teaching that is 54,000 student hours.

[2] This is not quite accurate; the live TED participants in 2009 were charged a considerable amount to attend TED, which covered the fixed costs of my talk (I was paid nothing) and the distribution costs. Nevertheless, the relative costs of delivery per student hour are extreme.

[3] http://www.ehow.com/info_7941300_broadway-actors-salary-range.html.

[4] The evidence for these assertions is surprisingly weak. Nevertheless, I am confident that the optimal lecture length is not 50–90 minutes. See Wilson, K., & Korn, J.H. (2007). “Attention during lectures: Beyond ten minutes.” Teaching of Psychology 34, 85-89 and for one of the better recent studies, Bunce, D. M., Flens, E A., & Neiles, K. Y. (2010). “How long can students pay attention in class? A study of student attention decline using clickers.” Journal of Chemical Education 87, 1438-1443.

[5] See Inside Higher Ed, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/07/educators-hear-advice-how-teach-large-courses#ixzz2Ai2ZhYQI

[6] http://www.clasp.org/admin/site/publications/files/Nontraditional-Students-Facts-2011.pdf.

[7] Garrett, Richard. Online Higher Education in the United States. Eduventures. Draft, Oct. 2012.

[8] ibid.

I do not wish to rain on Alex Tabarrok’s parade, though I shall venture a few skeptical remarks about this latest pedagogical revolution. I have never been a fan of the traditional fifty minute lecture, not as a student on the receiving end nor as a professor on the handing out end. Nor do I have Luddite inclinations; more than thirty years ago I gave some of the first radio talks for the Open University—the British precursor of present day online education. It was founded in 1969, the brainchild of Jennie Lee, the widow of Aneurin Bevan, the creator of the National Health Service. The OU embodied the British Labour Party’s wish to bring higher education to more than its traditional clientele of upper-income eighteen year olds, as well as the conviction of the day that the future of the British economy lay in hi-tech industry rather than what was later dismissed as “low value-added heavy metal bashing.”

Its students were already in employment, and could go at their own pace through a degree program of their choosing, advantages Tabarrok sees in current developments. It was never entirely free to users, although it was in the beginning very inexpensive; nor was it entirely revolutionary. Much like MOOCs today, it built on the model of the correspondence courses that had already enabled many thousands of aspirant working class students to gain professional qualifications, and added the then cutting edge technology of radio and television broadcasting. It did not revolutionize higher education, but it did a lot of good. More than a dozen years ago I also took part in a too-early and therefore abortive project for online lectures to be delivered by Oxford, Yale, and Stanford faculty.

I demur a little at Tabarrok’s picture of a higher education system dominated by large lecture courses. Fifty years ago, my undergraduate contemporaries thought lectures were mostly redundant, certainly as a method of handing out information. We read books and articles in learned journals, wrote essays, had them demolished by our tutors, and repeated the process until we graduated. Science students went to lectures, but that was another matter. Lectures were a distraction from educating ourselves; of course, the lectures of star performers like Isaiah Berlin and A.J.P. Taylor were another matter; that was a form of intellectual theater. And some lectures—Peter Strawson on Kant, for instance—had an austere elegance that was not to be missed. But the Gutenberg Revolution had rendered lectures redundant as a means of imparting knowledge; before the invention of movable type and the possibility of mass producing books, the transmission of knowledge (or mere speculation) depended on carefully constructed lectures, often dictated and transcribed verbatim, and students with excellent memories. After it, books ruled.

Oxford half a century ago was at the extreme end of highly personalized higher education, operating a tutorial system that depended on teachers willing to teach all the hours that God sent. But teaching in New York in 1967, at one of the CUNY colleges, I had classes of only thirty—classrooms couldn’t hold more than that—and they ran as give and take discussion groups with myself as a new professor giving the discussion what shape I could. The students’ papers suggested that they read both widely and deeply and were often capable of exact and merciless criticism. So, I am not absolutely convinced that arrival of the MOOC is going to rescue students from numbed inattention at the back of a lecture theater holding five hundred bored and reluctant fellow-captives. I am sure such places exist, but I’m not sure they are the norm.

The advantages of MOOCs seem to me to be obvious, though Alex Tabarrok does not dwell on those I’d emphasize. His vision of a utopia where we get educated wherever we can find a terminal, while universities and colleges are devoted to pure socialization, does not gladden my heart, perhaps because I’ve spent too many years in close proximity to drunk and noisy students. The great virtue of a system that can deliver excellent—we hope—courses wherever there is electricity and wi-fi, to my mind at least, is that it cuts the bricks and mortar costs of higher education very dramatically. Because Alex Tabarrok is so insistent on the pedagogical virtues of MOOCs, he rather understates the lower-tech possibilities implicit in the growth of the Internet. One that has a mildly distressing downside for those of us who like the feel of actual physical books is that anywhere in the world can in principle have access to almost every book and manuscript in every university library. It scales up the Gutenberg Revolution in a big way, and to my mind is quite as important as the opportunity of seeing Stanford professors doing their thing.

Since I think that education is about letting everyone who can benefit from it have access to whatever is feasible—two conditions that are frequently ignored in everyday higher education—I am more than friendly to the idea that the creators of Udacity and Coursera should enroll 160,000 students in a course on machine learning or software engineering. The completion rates of such courses are inevitably pretty low, but since the marginal cost of enrolling another student is close to zero, you still end up with many thousands of students having learned a good deal that they would not otherwise have learned, at a bargain price, with practically no investment in infrastructure, and not a lot of investment in human beings to grade assignments and provide feedback.

It’s obviously easier to construct such courses where the outcome is the inculcation of practical skills. Self-taught mathematics courses have existed for a long time, and it is not technically very difficult to create computer administered assessments for courses in programming and the like. Much professional education lends itself to the same techniques. The challenge to mimic the back-and-forth of a literature class is greater, but will be interesting in itself, and in any event the basic issue in any such class—“have you read the book and do you recall who the characters are and what they do?”—is not resistant to old-fashioned multiple choice testing.

I have qualms, nonetheless. One is that in over-selling the virtues of MOOCs, we may forget how much we can do to improve our everyday teaching. For instance, anyone asked to produce instructional material for a MOOC is asked to remember that there should be opportunities every few minutes for students to check whether they have kept up with what they’ve been told. But some variant on this is what every competent lecturer does; most do it informally, but many employ all sorts of hi-tech devices to help them do it, too. Another is that Tabarrok’s conviction that he has put into the can the best fifteen minutes teaching he has ever done has unmentioned but sinister implications. He may well be right about how good his lecture was. But ‘leveraging’ the best teaching suggests that an awful lot of people who presently enjoy teaching their students, like their students, and are in turn well-liked by their students, will now simply serve as teaching assistants to Alex Tabarrok or whoever is designated the purveyor of the truly excellent fifteen minutes. Who knows whether Tabarrok himself will survive the winnowing process? Will we now have teaching careers of the same length as the careers of most celebrities?

A third is that we shall exacerbate the tendencies of contemporary higher education to turn into a two-tier, or multi-tier, system in which the well-off and well-endowed academically and socially, receive personalized and individual attention, while everyone else gets a mass-produced and uniform product tailored to what the better-off and better-endowed believe are their needs. One recent MOOC involved the broadcasting of a course from the University of Pennsylvania in which you can see the twenty-odd students on the course in the room with their professor, interacting in the usual human fashion, while the unnumbered audience watches. I am not at all immune to the thought that the crumbs from the rich man’s table are better than simple starvation, but it would be nice to think that our technical ingenuity could be devoted to spreading the real intellectual riches of our civilization more equally than we have hitherto contrived to do.

In 1938, Orson Welles’ broadcast of the radio drama of War of the Worlds caused massive panic among listeners. Early scholars of communication used this event to cement their belief in what was called the “hypodermic needle” theory of communication. According to this model, a speaker or producer injected content into a passive audience. That audience would receive the message and react in predictable ways. Audiences were susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, but also capable of benefiting from high-minded content delivered by reputable sources.

While it did not take long after World War II for more sophisticated media and communication scholars to challenge and reject the hypodermic needle theory, it stubbornly re-emerges in the worst popular media criticism today. You hear it in whines from the right about “liberal media bias.” You see it when liberals blame Fox News for their inability to get more working-class Americans to vote for what liberals assume are their economic interests.

Sadly, the hypodermic needle theory also dominates the assumptions about higher education teaching and renders most recent discussions about Massive Open Online Courses shallow and hyperbolic.

We see it at work in an interesting and potentially persuasive essay by Alex Tabarrok. In this essay, Tabarrok conflates teaching with informing: “The productivity of teaching, measured in, say, kilobytes transmitted from teacher to student per unit of time, hasn’t increased much,” but MOOCs offer just that opportunity to substantially increase the rate of transfer, Tabarrok writes. Ah, if only education were that simple—or anything like the injection or “transfer” of information from one person to another.

I fear that his willingness to be uncritically dazzled by the efficient delivery of content has distracted Tabarrok from appreciating the variety of teaching tactics, tools, and methods that academics experiment with. The cartoon Tabarrok draws of higher education being a series of huge lectures taught by less-than-master professors does not accurately capture the diversity of higher education in the United States or the world.

Beyond that, Tabarrok conflates being a student with being a consumer. He writes “In the online world, consumers need not each consume at the same time, and suppliers need not produce at the moment of consumption.”

Higher education is a complex process through which one is merely guided. It’s a series of experiments that test one’s capacities, assess one’s talents, focus one’s interests, and enable the acculturation into the educated middle class. Along the way there are licensing procedures, awards, successes, failures, heartbreaks, and hangovers. There is, of course, a tangle of productions, consumptions, and commercial transactions embedded within higher education. But there is no single act of production or consumption that captures either the purpose or value of higher education.

Tabarrok acknowledges the value of the “college experience,” but he makes a mistake in distinguishing it from what happens in a course. Courses don’t end when the lecture is over and the book is closed. They are essential and embedded parts of a rich, humane project. Sometimes courses are the least important element of the process of education. Some people, like Bruce Springsteen, learn more from the three-minute record, baby, than they ever learned in school. But many of us would not have encountered that three-minute record without the social and intellectual petri dish we call the American university campus.

The classroom has rich value in itself. It’s a safe, almost sacred space where students can try on ideas for size in real time, gently criticize others, challenge authority, and drive conversations in new directions. But that does not mean that classrooms can’t or shouldn’t be simulated. And for the economic reasons Tabarrok cites there are good reasons to simulate classrooms.

Courses are not anything like plays—unless they are very bad courses. And online courses are not anything like movies—unless they are really boring movies. I have taught online for years with some success, some failure, and a lot of experimentation and learning.

But online teaching and MOOCs are not the same thing. In many ways they are antithetical. Online teaching has been succeeding for almost 20 years now. When done well or poorly online teaching overcomes the very costs Tabarrok cites—transportation, opportunity, etc. Yet when done well online courses include rich, almost constant interactions among students and faculty, a constant forum for feedback and correction, and space and time for conversation beyond the contours of the course material.

MOOCs, on the other hand, are more like fancy textbooks. They are all about the mass market and not the rich connectivity that established online courses offer their limited collection of students. MOOCs condense and fracture course material and present it in the pithiest, shallowest form. They lack improvisation, serendipity, and familiarity. They pander to the broadest possible audience because in the MOOC economy—such as it is—enrollment is currency and quality is measured by the number of people who have checked in without subtracting the number who check out.

That’s not to say that MOOCs could not improve greatly, as I trust they will. But the unfounded hyperbole surrounding MOOCs ignores the real outstanding work professors in all fields have been doing integrating digital and multimedia tools into their courses and the outstanding work being done with online courses that have reasonable, controlled enrollments.

Of course, you can’t make headlines with an outstanding traditional online course on accounting. You can only make headlines by “enrolling” more than 500,000 “students” (most of whom disappear almost instantly) in a MOOC or—better yet—“branding” a MOOC as an extension of a celebrity academic.

That leads me to Tabarrok’s claim that MOOCs offer a way for the most students to encounter the best teachers. How do we know that the best teachers are the ones doing the MOOCs? How do we know that the most popular MOOCs are the best? Are we to assume that popularity is a proxy for quality?

In short, we should not assume that. Quality teaching is contextual. My sister teaches math in a community college. She has students of all ages, most with a limited foundation in math. Most have children and work several jobs. She draws them into the field, inspires them to push further, gives them frank feedback, and spends hours with them after class. I, on the other hand, stand in front of hundreds of the brightest, most privileged young Americans and tell them how copyright works and privacy doesn’t. I have a global reputation as an author and scholar. My sister has a local reputation as a caring yet demanding teacher. Which Vaidhyanathan is the better teacher? Anyone who witnessed our courses would conclude that my sister is. But “the market” foolishly rewards me with prestige, a higher salary, more prepared and acculturated students, and global recognition. Which one of us would attract a bigger MOOC following? For this reason and others, you are not going to see either Vaidhyanathan performing for the MOOC audience any time soon.

MIT president L. Rafael Reif, in his inaugural address in September, declared that MOOCs represent “a great step forward for humanity, a step that we should all celebrate. I am deeply proud that MIT and its edX partners, Harvard and U.C. Berkeley, are helping to lead this revolution, higher education’s most profound technological transformation in more than 500 years.”

How could President Reif possibly know that MOOCs represent any significant change to American higher education, let alone its “most profound technological transformation in more than 500 years”?

As someone who has sat in many a classroom in Austin, Texas, I would nominate air conditioning for that honor. And as someone who researches the ways that technology affects society and vice versa, I would nominate the rise of the mainframe computer in the 1950s and 1960s before a simple Web-based platform that hosts text and video.

This may or may not be the dawn of a new technological age for higher education. But it is certainly the dawn of a new era of unfounded hyperbole.

Let’s be clear. MOOCs offer many advantages to institutions of higher education. And universities would be foolish to miss out on them, regardless of the empty rhetoric surrounding the MOOC madness. MOOCs offer great opportunities for established colleges and universities to market themselves in powerful new ways. Instead of showing off videos or images of lovely campuses filled with happy young students, universities can invite prospective students into a lecture (hopefully a good one) with a famous professor (hopefully a good one).

MOOCs offer even better opportunities for great populations of humanity who do not have access to high quality courses. If even one young person in a corner of the world without universities gets excited and motivated by physics or poetry, then the whole MOOC endeavor has paid off.

As of 2012, MOOCs are a public service that America’s wealthiest universities have chosen to engage in. Designing and running a MOOC is expensive, just like almost everything else in higher education. But these universities see a duty in sharing knowledge and expertise beyond their walls. This is not a new ethic among universities. But it’s easier to do than ever before.

So let’s focus on what we can learn and accomplish from the MOOC experiment and leave behind the unfounded hyperbole.

I enjoyed Alex Tabarrok’s essay, which makes a compelling case for online higher education while reminding us that, as with so many things, Neal Stephenson got there first. My only criticism is that Tabarrok’s vision of the future is not radical enough.

Tabarrok makes the sensible observation that higher education is likely to benefit star teachers, whose lectures and courses can be replicated for near-zero marginal cost. This was the model of online education in its infancy and adolescence—the best university lecturer performances, recorded and repackaged in a student-friendly way.

But courses in the new generation of online learning go much further. Like some of the video games Tabarrok mentions (Skyrim!) the latest online courses are being developed by teams of specialists with rich budgets and advanced production tools. Watching them be constructed is something to behold. Subject matter experts debate content items point by point, virtual laboratories are created, and cognitive tutors are fine-tuned to lead students toward the most useful materials, depending on their academic progress.

It’s an approach that was, as Alan Ryan notes in his response essay, presaged by the rich production values of British Open University courses produced for television. But the levels of interactivity, customization, and real-time communication now possible online represent an order of magnitude improvement in pedagogical quality. In the future I suspect that well-known scholars will serve a role similar to John Madden’s titular relationship with the blockbuster EA Sports football video game franchise. Their names will bring credibility to the product while the learning designers do all the real work behind the scenes.

Tabarrok may be too sanguine about the fate of traditional universities. He predicts that “many institutions will be able to raise the quality and breadth of the classes that they offer.” Perhaps—if they can afford to stay in business. The rise of Udacity, Coursera, edX, Saylor.org and others mean that, from this point forward, high-quality, impeccably branded online courses will be available to anyone in the world, anytime, anywhere, for free, forever. We will take this for granted in the same way that we simply assume free search and social networking as birthrights of the modern age.

The introduction of “$0” into a market characterized by rapidly increasing prices is sure to matter in important ways. How and when, exactly, is not yet clear. But it seems unlikely that traditional universities will be able to keep charging students thousands of dollars for ill-designed commodity courses in basic subjects when much better courses can be found online for free. And it is these high profit-margin courses that subsidize the cost of smaller, professor-dependent specialty courses in the upper divisions. Take away those revenues and university budgets—already stressed by shrinking public subsidies and the declining possibilities of revenue enhancing price discrimination—will struggle to remain solvent. Ryan calls this “sinister.” I think it’s just an honest appraisal of what is sure to come.

This assumes, of course, that students will be able to garner useful college credit from MOOCs, MRUniversity, and the like. They can’t, at the moment. But any traditional university administrator who thinks the present combination of regulatory barriers and consumer habits will keep back the tide of MOOC credits forever, or even for much longer, is living in a fantasy world. Just this week, the American Council on Education, the nation’s foremost traditional higher education lobbying organization, announced that it would begin evaluating MOOCs for credit recommendation. There are thousands of accredited colleges and universities and any one of them can choose to accept MOOC certificates as transfer credit. A few already have. Many are sure to follow.

The sheer weight of empiricism and common sense will also push this process rapidly forward. Last month, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that of the tens of thousands of students who enrolled in an MIT-sponsored circuits-and-electronics MOOC, only 320 aced the final exam. Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, recently told me that the final was designed to be particularly difficult—“nasty,” in his words. Agarwal estimated that had he himself sat down to take the exam—this is a man who until recently ran the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT—he might have scored 80 percent. Yet one of the students who scored 100 percent was a 15-year old in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia.

Earlier this week, the Chronicle published a very different tale of online education. In this one, an obscure junior college in the Midwest is giving three academic credits to thousands of academically deficient football players around the nation who take 10-day long online courses in challenging topics like “Creating a new folder in Windows XP.”

The idea that a teenage math genius in Mongolia deserves no academic credit for acing an MIT-grade final after months of hard work whereas a bunch of lazy jocks deserve three credits for taking week-long gut courses is ridiculous. It shocks the conscience. It cannot, and will not, endure.

We’re also going to find out how good traditional college courses really are. Tabarrok cites the “ineffable” qualities of learning in-person, while Siva Vaidhyanathan waxes poetic about traditional courses that “don’t end when the lecture is over and the book is closed. They are essential and embedded parts of a rich, humane project.” I would find this more persuasive if I had not taken many traditional college courses myself, nearly all of which ended promptly with the last lecture.

I don’t argue that the very best higher education experience is better than what MOOCs offer today. But traditional higher education is awash in mediocre education experiences that fall far short of that ideal. The number of traditional courses that are both worse and more expensive than the emerging gold standards in online learning is, in my estimation, very large. MOOC providers will be highly motivated to articulate clear academic standards and set a high bar for excellence, particularly those that aren’t branded by world-class universities. That’s what will distinguish them from their competitors. Those standards will become the benchmark against which traditional courses are compared. Many, I predict, will not measure up.

It’s also important to remember that traditional college credits are only the coin of the realm because we have collectively agreed it is so. We could agree on something else. New “open credentialing” movements like the badge competition recently sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation (creators of the free Firefox web browser) offer an alternative to the old regime of credits and transcripts. Badges are technically much superior to credits, giving users access to far more information about what the bearers know and can do. And since badges are an open system, they offer the possibility of a credentialing regime built to match the open learning resources of which MOOCs are a part.

Of course, you can’t easily get a job with a badge—yet. But this, again, is mostly a matter of habit, convention, and government regulation. These are not barriers on which traditional colleges and universities can permanently depend.

As Orwell and others have observed, sometimes it’s very hard to see what’s right in front of your nose. The new normal of great universities providing great courses online for free marks a turning point in the economics and conduct of higher education, one that will ultimately benefit students worldwide.

Alan Ryan and Siva Vaidhyanathan suggest that I have engaged in unfounded hyperbole, while Kevin Carey says I have not been radical enough. I am pleased to occupy the middle ground. To review briefly I suggested that online education has the following advantages:

• Leverage of the best professors teaching more students.
• Large time savings from less repetition in lectures (students in control of what to repeat) and from lower fixed costs (no need to drive to university).
• Greater flexibility in when lectures are consumed (universities open 24 hours a day) and in the lecture format (no need to limit to 50 minutes).
• Greater scope for productivity improvements as capital substitutes for labor and greater incentive to invest in productivity when the size of the market increases.
• Greater scope for randomized controlled trials of educational strategies thus more learning about what works in education.

Siva Vaidhyanathan does not disagree with most of these points, but he does confidently insist that the classroom is special, so special that it dominates the above considerations.

The classroom has rich value in itself. It’s a safe, almost sacred space where students can try on ideas for size in real time, gently criticize others, challenge authority, and drive conversations in new directions.

As Kevin Carey notes “I would find this more persuasive if I had not taken many traditional college courses myself.” Vaidhyanathan counters that:

The cartoon Tabarrok draws of higher education being a series of huge lectures taught by less-than-master professors does not accurately capture the diversity of higher education in the United States or the world.

Here Vaidhyanathan seems not to know the facts, for the facts are that a large majority of college teachers in the United States today are adjuncts, and they are neither tenured nor on the tenure track. At the undergraduate level a majority of courses are taught by adjuncts and graduate students, especially the large, introductory courses. Adjuncts are often teaching heavy course loads for low pay on a part-time basis, sometimes even cobbling jobs together from multiple universities. Part-time faculty alone make up nearly half of all college teachers, and although some are great, part-timers are less likely to teach in the participatory style that Vaidhyanathan extols. As one study (pdf) put it, (see also here):

When compared with full-time faculty, part-time faculty advise students less frequently, use active teaching techniques less often, place a lower priority on educating students to be good citizens, spend less time preparing for class, include diversity in their teaching less frequently, and are less likely to participate in a teaching workshop.

Even more importantly, Vaidhyanathan’s poetics simply assume what was to be argued, namely that the online experience cannot duplicate the offline experience or offer its own set of rich values. Why can’t students in the online world also try ideas on for size, gently criticize others, challenge authority, and drive conversations in new directions? As soon as one asks this question, Vaidhyanathan’s objections disappear in a puff of smoke. Here is Carole Cadwalladr, a reporter from the Observer writing about an online course in genetics:

And that’s when I have my being-blown-away moment. The traffic is astonishing. There are thousands of people asking—and answering—questions about dominant mutations and recombination. And study groups had spontaneously grown up: a Colombian one, a Brazilian one, a Russian one. There’s one on Skype, and some even in real life too. And they’re so diligent! If you are a vaguely disillusioned teacher, or know one, send them to Coursera: these are people who just want to learn.

Rather than contrasting offline with online, I am more interested in how online can complement and improve traditional education methods. Instead of either-or, let’s think about flipping the classroom or other techniques that can take advantage of the best of both worlds.

I’d also like to see more comparisons and more empirical evidence. Here’s a question. How large does the typical classroom have to be before an online classroom is superior? Five students? Thirty? One hundred? My answers are that a philosophy seminar with five students is going to be better face-to-face. In a class of thirty, I’d take a good online class over a typical offline class. In a class of one hundred I’d take online every time. What do others say? Where is the dividing line and why?

Some 30% of students today are already enrolled in an online course. Do Ryan and Vaidhyanathan think these students are making a mistake in giving up the magic of the classroom? What should students with full or part-time jobs do? Which students and which classes should go online? Blanket statements don’t seem useful here. I think Econ 101 would work well online. Plenty of math and stats classes will work well online and will be even better accompanied with interactive tools and tutorials. As an economist, I think on the margin rather than in terms of absolutes, and at the current margin I see online being highly productive.

We do need more studies of offline, online, and blended education models, but the evidence that we do have is supportive of the online model. In 2009, The Department of Education conducted a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies and found:

• Students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.
• Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.
• Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed than in those studies where online learners worked independently.
• The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types. Online learning appeared to be an effective option for both undergraduates (mean effect of +0.30, p

Vaidhyanathan is correct that online education is much more than MOOCs, something that I also emphasized in my article. But I don’t understand why he castigates MOOCs. Vaidhyanathan argues that MOOCs “pander to the broadest possible audience” and “condense and fracture course material and present it in the pithiest, shallowest form.” Really? Consider the syllabus from edX’s course 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics:

The course introduces engineering in the context of the lumped circuit abstraction. Topics covered include: resistive elements and networks; independent and dependent sources; switches and MOS transistors; digital abstraction; amplifiers; energy storage elements; dynamics of first- and second-order networks; design in the time and frequency domains; and analog and digital circuits and applications. Design and lab exercises are also significant components of the course.

…To keep pace with the class, you are expected to complete all the work by the due dates indicated. Homeworks and labs must be completed by the Sunday of the week following the one in which they are posted. Weekly coursework includes interactive video sequences, readings from the textbook, homework, online laboratories, and optional tutorials. The course will also have a midterm exam and a final exam. Those who successfully earn enough points will receive an honor code certificate from MITx.

In order to succeed in this course, you must have taken an AP level physics course in electricity and magnetism. You must know basic calculus and linear algebra and have some background in differential equations…

Somehow I think “you must have some background in differential equations” is not pandering to the broadest possible audience.

I am actually less bothered by the factual content of Vaidhyanathan’s claim—surely some MOOCs are shallow—than by the lack of comparison or analysis. Shallow compared to what? Compared to the best offline course at MIT? To the median course? Again, the issue is on what margin. Or is Vaidhyanathan claiming a link between the medium and message? Does online education have to be shallow? If so, why?

Vaidhyanathan also asks “How do we know that the best teachers are the ones doing the MOOCs?” I am tempted merely to list some MOOCs and their teachers; Sebastian Thrun, father of the Google chauffeured vehicle, on artificial intelligence; Sergey Brin, founder of Google, on search algorithms; Anant Agarwal, winner of MIT’s Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching, on computer science. Yes, I think we have some grounds for thinking that these are good teachers. That approach, however, would also be non-analytic.

Online education allows the best teachers to teach more students. Online education also allows the worst teachers to teach more students. What grounds do we have for thinking that the best will dominate? Let’s do the proper comparison. In a world with more online education, will more students be taught by better teachers compared to a world with less online education? I think the answer is yes. First, online education will increase options. Students at smaller colleges and universities, for example, will have access to teachers from other universities including Harvard, MIT, George Mason (of course!) and others. I have enough trust in the students to think that, by and large, more options will lead to a greater demand for better teachers. Admittedly, it’s not guaranteed. Pauly Shore, after all, is a movie star.

In addition to the general benefits of choice, I agree with Vaidhyanathan that MOOCs are like “fancy textbooks.” So let’s consider the economics of fancy textbooks, say the iPad textbook Life on Earth. The sample chapters are stunning—the text features animations, in-text videos, and gorgeous photos and illustrations. Now, given the investment that has gone into this textbook, who would you get to write the chapters and set the structure and tone? A poor teacher? Unlikely, as that will reduce the value of your entire investment. Instead you want to match high quality capital with high-quality labor, i.e. you want to partner capital with a great teacher—perhaps even with one of the greatest biologists of his generation, perhaps even with a two-time Pulitzer winner for non-fiction, perhaps even with someone like E.O. Wilson, who is in fact the author of this textbook. (FYI, the general principle—the best wants to work with the best—is called O-ring production and you can find a lecture on that topic at MRUniversity.com).

As Kevin Carey writes:

…the latest online courses are being developed by teams of specialists with rich budgets and advanced production tools. Watching them be constructed is something to behold. Subject matter experts debate content items point by point, virtual laboratories are created, and cognitive tutors are fine-tuned to lead students toward the most useful materials, depending on their academic progress.

Is online education the greatest innovation in education in the last 500 years? We will see, but given the potential cost savings, the reasonable results on teaching outcomes, and the potential for much greater growth, there is a sound basis for moving forward.

When pronouncing MOOC, the accent is on the “Massive.” Everything exciting about MOOCs comes from their potential (if often fleeting) massive enrollments. And everything troubling and challenging about MOOCs reflects their massiveness as well.

As I explained in my original response to Alex Tabarrok’s love letter to Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs are not the totality of online courses. Conflating the two generates misunderstanding of the diversity of teaching modes and techniques that have been instrumental in enhancing higher education for 20 years. Yet in his response to my essay, Tabarrok doubles down on this conflation and several other errors.

Tabarrok continues to presume fame is some sort of proxy for teaching ability, citing—of all people—Google co-founder Sergey Brin as some sort of master teacher despite his complete lack of experience in the craft. Tabarrok also presumes that the part-time status of the great majority of America’s college teachers indicates that the quality of these courses is necessarily below those of star professors at the constellation of elite research universities.

That most courses in America are taught by struggling adjuncts for absurdly low remuneration is a problem to be solved by increasing their status, pay, and benefits. It’s not a reason to double down on the star system and dream that MOOCs can render those hard-working adjuncts redundant. As someone who has hired, fired, and assessed dozens of adjunct and full-time instructors, I can attest that there is no correlation between one’s status and one’s teaching skills.

I have no reason to doubt that Sebastian Thrun is an expert teacher for Stanford students. Perhaps he is great in other contexts as well. But as I argued in my first essay, skillful teaching is contextual. The methods, tone, diction, and pace of a course at MIT or Stanford are nothing like the best practices at a community college or regional state university. The more diverse one’s class is, the more challenging the task of serving as many students as possible as well as possible. Just because someone is rich and famous does not make him a skilled teacher in all contexts, or, for that matter, in any context.

Now, Sergey Brin would certainly attract more initial registrants to his MOOC on search algorithms than some unknown computer science professor who teaches four courses a semester at California State University East Bay. But there is no reason to believe that Brin is a better teacher in general, let alone for the underserved populations that we all hope MOOCs can reach. Which teacher would a MOOC firm prefer on its roster? Which teacher would do the job better? Do we have any reason to believe they are the same teacher? If not, how should we adjust the incentive system of MOOCs to get the best teacher in front of the biggest audience?

As they stand today, MOOCs reward and enhance established brands. Arguments for MOOC mania always cite brands like Stanford, MIT, and Google. The more famous performers make the list in MOOC love letters like Tabarrok’s essay. The massive initial enrollments get cited as evidence of revolutionary success. Institutions with strong global reputations such as the University of Virginia (where I work) rush to sign contracts with Coursera so as not to be left out of MOOC mania.

Tabarrok wonders if I believe the 30 percent of students taking online courses are making a mistake when I explicitly defended online courses and stated that I had taught them as well. He claims that I “castigate” MOOCs when I do no such thing.

I support MOOCs. I oppose simplistic thinking about complex concepts. I oppose rushing into expensive policy initiatives with grand revolutionary rhetoric before weighing the costs and benefits. And I oppose technological fundamentalism, market fundamentalism, and all other fundamentalisms.

If we support the MOOC experiment it would be foolish to do so without confronting the serious incentive problems MOOCs present to teachers, students, and institutions of higher education. These are not reasons to quit MOOCs. They are reasons to take them seriously and strive to maximize the rewards of MOOCs while curbing the perverse incentives.

We should offer MOOCs that aim for many levels of expertise and in many languages. We should not reward universities or faculty based on initial, inflated enrollment. We should question the “O” as in “open” because a flood of trolls is about to show up in MOOC discussions, threatening to ruin everyone’s best efforts. We should ask why universities are not hosting and launching their own homegrown MOOCs when the software is simple and the talent is all in-house. Why engage with private companies that have completely different missions and demands than universities do?

The current incentives are all out of whack. And all this attention paid to MOOCs is counterproductive to their potential success. We should be encouraging and rewarding experimentation at all levels of enrollment, in the widest array of platforms, with a goal of enhancing quality teaching instead of merely crowing about quantity. We should be investing in skill development across the teaching faculties and putting part-time teachers on full-time salaries. We should be championing the potential synergies between great research and great teaching. We should reverse the dangerous trend of federal disinvestment from scientific research, the sort of funding that paid for Sergey Brin’s graduate work at Stanford and directly funded the development of PageRank, the core algorithm that has made Google ubiquitous and Brin rich and famous.

We should be justifiably proud of the remarkable and enviable triumphs of American higher education. Instead, we find most recent conversations about higher education echoing around this one tiny (and so far trivial) aspect of the complex and diverse ecosystem of higher education. This focus on technological platforms at the expense of actual threats, challenges, and successes robs us of the ability to have sober, informed debates about the proper level and style of investment in higher education. So I suggest we let MOOCs grow and do their best work, learn from successes and mistakes, and stop assuming that they are the simple answer to anything meaningful and profound in the production and distribution of knowledge. The world is just not that simple.