Higher Ed Is ‘Disrupting’ Itself Into Oblivion

Around 2012-13, one of the many tech hype cycles that have punctuated the past few decades reached its crescendo. I’m referring to the craze for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), which began when a cluster of new startups started promoting free, open-enrollment courses taught by faculty from top-tier universities like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. Online education was several decades old by this time, but the combination of elite branding with the Silicon Valley language of “disruption” managed to repackage it as something thrilling and inevitable, rather than a second-rate option for part-time students at schools like the University of Phoenix.