The MOOC seems to follow the same business plan as “companies” like Twitter and Facebook: if you give the product away for long enough, you’ll destroy the competition and thereafter hold a monopoly. But how will MOOCs eventually monetize their product? Advertising? *shudder* Do we want the competition destroyed? The US education establishment reduced to a few dominant universities? *double shudder*.

Furthermore, I’m amused/confused/irritated by the repeated assertion that the lecture is a bad format for learning. Depends on who’s doing the lecturing. Especially for my undergrad, I found lectures to be an excellent format to learn. And no, a good lecturer doesn’t just stand there and talk like a tape-recorder playing back, s/he interacts with h/her audience, like any performer. Perhaps the dis against lecturing is because so many faculty so much hate to do it because they’re poor lecturers and don’t want to bother getting better. Along those lines, in grad school there was a movement at the institution I attended to switch grad courses to a 1-2 week intensive seminar. Guess who gets the most out of that? Ha ha, the prof, who gets the rest of the quarter/semester off.

Things aren’t a good ideas just because their possible or just because their new ideas. Some new ideas stink.

I imagine you’ve had a few students who come to your classes with, non-standard perspective, that can cause them to dominant topics of discussion and hinder the flow of a seminar. Multiply the seminar size by 1,000 and I have some sympathy for what Prof McKenzie was dealing with. Fatal to MOOCs? Like you said, if it replaces the tax-payer mess that is the current for-profit sector, everyone wins but the existing companies …