They are calling it higher education’s “Napster moment”. Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, leading chronicler of corporate decline, says universities are going to be upended by “disruptive innovation”.
Sir Michael Barber, chief education strategist at Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, says: “An avalanche is coming.” And to those who say universities have seen off threats, such as distance learning, before, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put out a press release that said (really): “This time is different.”
They are talking about Moocs: massive open online courses, which put the world’s most famous professors on video, online. Why pay huge sums to attend a top university when you can listen to the same lectures on your iPad for free?