Excerpt from A Direction for Online Courses from LinkedIn.com by Jose Ferreira, Founder at Knewton (emphasis DSC)
The Non-MOOC Landscape
The improvements — such as high quality textbooks, materials, and supporting services —needed to turn MOOCs from lectures into fully developed courses cost money. In response, some MOOC facilitators are beginning to offer non-MOOCs, sometimes called SPOCs — “small, private online courses.” Udacity partnered with Georgia Tech to offer a Masters in Computer Science priced around $7,000.
The program is neither “massive” nor “open.” It is, however, the future. Within a decade, virtually every large university in the United States, and many elsewhere as well, will offer online courses — for credit and for fee. These courses will be particularly useful to students who don’t already have access to comparable courses.
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The for-profit universities have just a few years — until there is widespread market awareness that these not-for-profit degree programs exist — to improve and in some cases reinvent their operations.
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It will be these high-production value, for-credit online courses that will play the central role in the ongoing educational revolution. It will be the institutions themselves who are the great disruptors.