The Times and the Washington Post both weighed in yesterday and today with long pieces about the rapid growth of MOOCs, or Massive Online Open Courses—basically, Internet-based education.

The Times frames the issue thusly:

While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free).

Harvard is not mentioned in this article whatsoever; the piece focuses on Stanford, which hopes to monetize its courses by collecting data on the students and selling it. Creepy Stanford.

Though it mentions Harvard only in passing, the Post article raises the issues posed by MOOCs better than the Times does:

The courses pose questions for top universities: Are they diluting or enhancing brands built on generations of selectivity? Are they undercutting a time-tested financial model that relies on students willing to pay a high price for a degree from a prestigious institution? Or are they accelerating the onset of a democratized, globalized version of higher education?

...“Students and families that are being asked to pony up $150,000 or $200,000 for a credential are going to start asking, ‘What’s the value of this thing?’ ” said Richard A. DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech, which is part of the Coursera venture.

That, I think, is the crux of the issue. While it’s all well and good to celebrate the democratizing and knowledge-spreading virtues of MOOCs, they will invariably diminish the powerful, central role of an on-campus experience. I think about what college will cost for my son in 17 years—$100, 000 annually? $125, 000? It’s absurd. And meanwhile, college presidents are becoming millionaires, professors spend more time profiteering than teaching, and college tuitions and fees rise annually higher than the rate of inflation.

Which of course begs this question, cited in WashPo:

Burck Smith, chief executive of StraighterLine, which sells low-price online courses, contends that MOOCs are overhyped. He said universities that give their product away are likely to face challenges similar to those newspapers confronted when they launched open-access Web sites.

“Free content has never really been a successful business model,” Smith said.

I see a similar evolution in the world of wealth management, where several start-ups are are now offering Internet-based financial advising at fees that are considerably less than those charged by traditional financial advisors. The old guard pooh-poohs this and says that high net worth folks will always want face time, not Face Time. I’m not so sure. And similarly, university professors might think that the top students will always want to be on campus, physically interacting with peers. I wouldn’t take this for granted either.

The real question, it seems to me, is how good these online courses are, and whether students learn as much from them as they would by being in a physical classroom. It’s hard for me to imagine that they’ll get as much out of it; the immersion just won’t be as deep. (Although, with the advent of computers and cell phones in the classroom, the immersive quality of that experience has been diminished, so the gap might not be as large as one would think.)

None of these issues are a reason to stop offering MOOCs, of course. As some posters on this blog have pointed out, MOOCs are a great way to spread knowledge around the world and reinvigorate what universities should be about, rather than the knowledge-industrial centers they have become. That’s undoubtedly true. But the ultimate result of MOOCs might not just be a democratization of education, but a shallowing, for lack of a better word, of education. We’ll see.