Wooster Horizon Group

But who’s left to teach all those less-than-ideal students at San Jose State? Living, breathing professors. Any administration that’s seriously thinking about signing a license with a MOOC provider to automate the teaching of those students who need living, breathing professors the most will have to think about Thrun’s pivot before it lets the robots take over. If they have their own self interest at heart (let alone the interests of those students), they won’t do it. I think that is something to celebrate. It’s also worth noting the incredible irony here. MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses. However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer without the guidance that living, breathing professors provide to people negotiating its rocky shores for the first time. People need people. That means that the only way to open higher education to the masses is to hire more people to teach, either in person or online. Accept no austerity-inspired technological substitutes because bringing quality higher education to the world won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but it will be good for the world in the long run.

Another respondent was acidic about the industry generally. “I’ve become a firm believer that most of our campus leaders are stuck in a ‘quick fix’ mentality when it comes to enrollment success,” he wrote. “I continue to see campuses make knee-jerk reactions and spend heavily to improve enrollment in the short run, only to see the cycle turn downward once the strategy is no longer viable, or their competition matches that strategy with one of their own. True campus-culture changes are the real creators of success, but most leaders are too afraid to upset the apple cart and deal with the inevitable groaning from faculty.”

“I am thinking, frankly, that we have to have productivity gains in higher education,” said John Curry, a former vice president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who now works for the Huron Consulting Group. “The big gains have to come out of the education-research sector because that is still on the order of 70 percent of the operating budget of universities.”

First, the possibility that higher-education institutions are unfocused. The “buffet model” of higher education—where students come to a college and choose from a vast array of majors and programs—is not financially sustainable, Mr. Staisloff said. “That points to a disconnect between the mission and market,” he said. More institutions should ask themselves: What are we good at? What can we offer that you can’t just get anywhere? And perhaps they should offer a more-limited palette of majors and programs.

"From a pedagogical perspective, it was the best I could have done," he says. "It was a good class." Only it wasn't: For all of his efforts, Statistics 101 students were not any more engaged than any of Udacity's other students. "Nothing we had done had changed the drop-off curve," Thrun acknowledges.

Among those pupils who took remedial math during the pilot program, just 25% passed. And when the online class was compared with the in-person variety, the numbers were even more discouraging. A student taking college algebra in person was 52% more likely to pass than one taking a Udacity class,

"At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment," Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor. "If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?"