What will higher education become as the MOOC innovation era plays out?

Setting dire predictions aside it seems likely that students will have a vast range of resources for learning at their disposal. With MOOCs, MOORs, badge systems, learning communities and other innovations coming on line students will be able to get content delivery, active learning support, office hours and assessment from a variety of different sources. All of these will be available these at a wider range of price points and qualities than is possible today.

What do we do with our on-campus courses in this environment? How can we use these innovations to offer students a better education than ever before? What will it be like running courses that make extensive use of open online resources? What will open online courses be best at? Worst? What must we excel at?

These questions led us to develop a Coursera MOOC, which ran for the first time this summer. We are now offering that MOOC in parallel with an on-campus course, in a continued effort to understand the relative strengths of each modality. The talk will report on these experiences and present our current beliefs about the challenges ahead.