As with almost everything, there are two sides to the
massive open online course (MOOC) debate. Proponents see MOOCs as a revolution providing
high-quality education to more people at less cost, while opponents are
concerned about the quality since classroom instruction is lost.
Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of
Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees a future where
elite schools weather the disruption of MOOCs because they are well off
financially while a larger group of colleges and universities won’t survive.
“My fear is that we’re plunging forward with these
massively free online education resources and we’re not thinking much about the
economics,” Cusumano said in an interview with The New York Times.
Cusumano sees similarities between the strategic
mistakes of giving away content made by media companies between 1998 and 2006
with the giveaway pricing of education by MOOCs. He wrote in an article that
appeared in the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery that free online education could
become the norm if enough colleges and universities join the movement.
“Stanford, MIT, Harvard, et al. have already opened a
kind of Pandora’s box, and there may be no easy way to go back and charge
students even a moderately high tuition rate for open online courses,” he
wrote. “Free learning via the Internet seems here to stay. It is probably most
valuable in moderation and as a complement to traditional university education
and degrees, not as a substitute. It also will probably force educational
institutions to bring down the rising cost of education, as well as the rising
prices of tuitions. This seems positive, but may lead to potentially negative
effects and unintended consequences: Elite universities need to ensure the true
costs of their MOOCs do not become too high for society as a whole by
destroying the economic foundations of less-prominent educational
institutions—or of themselves.”
