In the Year of Disruptive Education

In retrospect, 2012 may well be remembered as the year when Internet technology enabled the popularity of MOOCs—or massive open online courses—a form of disruptive or transformative education currently growing at a meteoric rate.

In just the past several months, top U.S. universities like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania put some of their classrooms online, giving countless students worldwide access to a higher education never before within their grasp.

One of the most successful online classes—some say it was the tipping point for the MOOC movement—was "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" taught by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, and Sebastian Thrun, a Google vice president, last fall. More than 160,000 students signed up and 23,000 completed the course.

"There had been decades of various types of online classes," says Norvig. "It is just that now all the technology is coming together to allow online classrooms of that size on a global basis."

Those who may benefit most from MOOCs are the people in the developing world who previously had no access to consistent, quality secondary education at low cost. Indeed, of the students who took Norvig and Thrun's class, one-third were from the U.S., one-third were from Europe, and one-third were from the rest of the world, with the majority located in India and Brazil.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/12/157884-in-the-year-of-disruptive-education/fulltext