By Kevin Hartnett, Boston.com
The “MOOC revolution” in higher education— the advent of massive online open courses—is causing massive anxiety in American universities, where professors are worried about the consequences of computers replacing campuses as places where people learn. Two hundred years ago, higher education faced a different distance-learning technology, one as cutting-edge as MOOCs, that also augured a revolution in the way we think about knowledge. “A textbook is something anyone can read no matter who they are or where they’re from. It allows education to occur on a global, universal scale,” says Hansun Hsiung, a fourth-year graduate student at Harvard University who studies the rise and spread of textbooks in late-18th-century Europe and Japan. Today it might seem that there’s nothing more boring or conventional than textbooks, but 200 years ago they were a radical idea.
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