The Internet has disrupted or threatened to disrupt the traditional business models in many different areas, including publishing, record companies, retail sales, motion pictures, and advertising. One potential source of disruption for higher education is online learning, especially the recent focus on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Can…

The long awaited and hotly debated "disruption" of public education may finally have begun. Technology, the force that has transformed one industry after another, from the industrial revolution through the information age, is on the cusp of reshaping schools fundamentally. This is heady talk. Historically, schools have been quite adept…

Sebastian Thrun gave up tenure at Stanford University after 160,000 students signed up for his free online version of the course "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence." The experience completely changed his perspective on education, he said, so he ditched teaching at Stanford and launched the private Web site Udacity, which offers…

Education in the 21st century is diverse not only in content and discipline but also in format and delivery. Today's students have access to a broad range of information, knowledge, ideas, and opinions well beyond their classroom. Never before have learners been able to interact so closely with instructors, mentors, subject-matter experts, and…

Over the past decade, a small revolution has taken place at some of the world's leading universities, as they have started to provide free access to undergraduate course materials--including syllabi, assignments, and lectures--to anyone with an Internet connection. Yale offers high-quality audio and video recordings of a careful selection of…

The latest installment of the Fordham Institute's "Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning" series investigates one of the more controversial aspects of digital learning: How much does it cost? In this paper, the Parthenon Group uses interviews with more than fifty vendors and online-schooling experts to estimate today's average…

Will the digital-learning movement repeat the mistakes of the charter-school movement? How much more successful might today's charter universe look if yesterday's proponents had focused on the policies and practices needed to ensure its quality, freedom, and resources over the long term? What mistakes might have been avoided? Damaging scandals…

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an…