Michelle R. Weise, Ph.D., senior research fellow in higher education at the
Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation puts forward the idea that MOOCs are simply another form of higher education designed by academics around their own interests rather than focusing on the needs of the workforce.
Rather than the MOOC, what she believes is actually revolutionizing online education is online
competency-based education: affordable, accessible, targeted, and high-quality programs for workers to skill-up. According to Michelle Weise, "Online competency-based education has the potential to provide learning experiences that drive down costs, accelerate degree completion, and produce a variety of convenient, customizable, and targeted programs for the emergent needs of our labor market." To read the full article, go to
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/10/the-real-revolution-in-online-education-isnt-moocs/
By targeting specific skills gaps, these competency-based courses seem ideal for organisations to train their staff specifically for the skills required, but does that really make them more revolutionary than MOOCs as Michelle Weise suggests? It is the MOOC concept that brought online learning into the limelight in the first place. Doesn't that make MOOCs the real revolution in Online Education?