Why do you think MOOCs will lower tuition?
They might lower production costs inside the university,* but previous means of doing that (increasing ratio of adjuncts vs TT faculty) haven’t resulted in reduced tuition (far from it). Instead the increased “profit” from cost savings has been kept in-house. Why should we expect the alleged savings from MOOCs to be treated any differently?
*There will be some admin costs involved in implementing new tracking and designing new curricula (though no doubt some of that work will be extracted from faculty), and the courses they will most likely replace (at least at first) will be low cost / high revenue large lecture course, so there's not a lot of blood left in that stone. But let's grant that there could be some production cost savings.
Lots of comments by me on this topic at this thread at LGM.
The work of Jonathan Rees deserves attention.
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