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Hearing that a new, stripped down product or service in your marketplace is “good enough” should strike fear in the hearts of market leaders.
This may be about to happen in the world of higher education. A recent announcement by the American Council on Education (ACE) states that they will begin evaluating MOOCs to determine whether they are “good enough” for ACE to recommend that schools offer academic credit for them.
The ACE announcement is a continuation of the “Did MOOCs Just Make Landfall” theme we blogged about a few weeks ago and, if ACE deems MOOCs to be credit-worthy, as Antioch University did in licensing several Coursera courses, then the storm may really be here. In the path? Potentially faculty. Once MOOCs become credit-worthy, nearly any college or university can offer their students “the best” faculty from “the best” university. If some of the world’s most famous academic economists MOOCed, how many economics faculty would other schools “need?”
Many colleges and universities will be impacted – some positively and some less so. If students are able to create their own program by taking courses from a variety of instructors at numerous institutions, will it really matter where they get their degree? From an early StratEDgy post on the coming disruption of the higher education market:
“Based on rising costs, different individual needs, the scalability of online education and the improvements in technologies and pedagogies in recent years, the disruption of the higher education market may occur very quickly. And the list of “best” colleges a decade from now may look radically different than the list of today.”
Who else do you think is in the path?
