by Charles Day, Physics Today
Wall Street Journal: In an op-ed, L. Rafael Reif, an electrical engineer and president of MIT, ranks the technological “upheaval” posed by online education with the one that the printing press caused. Citing edX, Coursera, Udacity, and “other online-learning platforms” that “offer the teaching of great universities” inexpensively, he predicts that “we haven’t seen anything yet” and observes that this is happening just when “residential education’s long-simmering financial problem is reaching a crisis point.” In the soon-to-arrive future that Reif envisions, information technology, thanks to its possible scale, can make “residential education better and less expensive even as it promises to offer education to many millions more people.” He summarizes: “The positive development in online learning and the negative trend in residential-education costs came about independently, but it’s now impossible to consider the future of higher education without thinking of both.”
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