MIT has led the way in pushing the higher education industry to embrace the digital revolution, but Michael Cusumano, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management is asking his colleagues to slow down and consider whether—as with the newspaper industry before it—the higher education industry will come to regret the high cost of offering its goods and services for free.
Massive open online courses (or MOOCs) have huge potential benefits. Through EdX, a joint program with Harvard and now several other universities, MIT gives anyone with an internet connection unprecedented access to the resources of a world-class university by offering courses online free of charge. Several other startups, like Coursera and Udacity, operate on a similar model. The open, egalitarian nature of the web is great, though there is always debate over whether online courses can really replicate the interactive experience of a residential university. Cusumano’s critiques are concerned less with this and more with the business model as MIT has currently set it up.
Cusumano wrote an article airing his concerns for the April issue of Communications of the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery’s monthly magazine. In it, he examines how an economic model that offers goods and services for free over the web has hurt other industries, from newspapers and magazines to encyclopedias to music.
“Other industries that went digital became enormously disruptive, sometimes thoughtlessly, ” Cusumano says in an interview. “And so in terms of education, I just want my colleagues to slow down a little bit and think about the implications of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. I don’t think we can stop the internet … But you can figure out a way to not be crushed.”
