MOOC Mania

Moocs could be the solution to the college crisis. In this article Katherine Mangan says "a study released in July by Bain & Company that concludes that one third of the nation's colleges and universities are financially unsustainable. "  Online classes could prove to be competition for Universities and even key to keeping the price of education down. With the possibility of education being free or at a low cost, more students will take the idea of furthering their education into consideration, and more people who find themselves unhappy or in dead end jobs will take going back to school into consideration. 

 "Thomas K. Lindsay, director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation," says that "technological advances have made the online-learning process more interactive and in many ways more personal than the large lecture classes typical of many introductory courses." This could be very true. More advanced courses require face-to-face hands on learning, but Moocs may be beneficial for courses usually taught in a large lecture halls that wouldn't have personal learning atmosphere anyway. If they are cost efficient, and do not compromise the quality of the learning experience, as many online courses have in the past then they should be taken into consideration as college credit by large universities. 

There are still many questions that are being raised about Mooc's. One which I personally find insignificant is how can Universities continue to make money from them. If the loss of revenue from introductory courses prevent a college from sustaining itself then maybe it should be allowed to fail. Not that I believe less educational institutions is the solution to any of the current economic issues, it would just seem ridiculous to allow any institution  to continue to take money from students that is sustaining above its means. But I doubt that is the reason why this question is asked. I think Universities are going to be fine without the revenue from their introductory courses, I think they are just genuinely concerned with the idea of education being free. The only reason revenue would need to be gained from these courses is not to benefit any university, it is not research or their name being taken from these courses, but revenue would need to be churned simply to be able to pay the professors teaching the courses, pay the proctors, and graders for these courses. If revenue is gained through advertisements and through charging for credentials then the I'm  sure it would meet the costs, if not surpass them.

http://chronicle.com/article/Massive-Excitement-About/134678/