Yet, for the moment, the market price is “free.” That leads to a bit of conundrum — big expensive ongoing fixed costs to produce something that we give away? How will we “monetize” it? What will the economic model be, and how will moocs change the higher education market?
The grumpy response to moocs: When Gutenberg invented moveable type, universities reacted in horror. “They’ll just read the textbook. Nobody will come to lectures anymore!” It didn’t happen. Why should we worry now?
As Alex pointed out, there is a good analogy between textbook publishing and mooc creation — high fixed, low marginal cost (now zero for textbooks too). It leads to superstars with established brand names taking over the market, and Alex speculated that publishers will know how to recover costs.
A lot of mooc is, in fact, a modern textbook — because the twitter generation does not read. Forcing my campus students to watch the lecture videos and answer some simple quiz questions, covering the basic expository material, before coming to class — all checked and graded electronically — worked wonders to produce well prepared students and a brilliant level of discussion. Several students commented that the video lectures were better than the real thing, because they could stop and rewind as necessary. The “flipped classroom” model works.