Dive Summary:
- Nathan Harden writes for The American Interest with a critical assessment of which schools stand to be most competitive in the coming decades as new online models proliferate in higher ed.
- Harden suspects that middle-tier universities who have overspent on facilities and services catering to residential students may be the most at risk to disruption as MOOCs become more mainstream.
- He also proposes that prestigious universities with name recognition will have the easiest time transitioning into new models, especially those who find ways to offer online credentialing early on.
From the article:
"... In the future, the primary platform for higher education may be a third-party website, not the university itself. What is emerging is a global marketplace where courses from numerous universities are available on a single website. Students can pick and choose the best offerings from each school; the university simply uploads the content. Coursera, for example, has formed agreements with Penn, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan to manage these schools’ forays into online education. On the non-profit side, MIT has been the nation’s leader in pioneering open-source online education through its MITx platform, which launched last December and serves as the basis for the new edX platform. ..."