Learning new lessons

摘要

Top-quality teaching, stringent admissions criteria and impressive qualifications allow the world's best universities to charge mega-fees: over $50,000 for a year of undergraduate study at Harvard. Less exalted providers have boomed too, with a similar model that sells seminars, lectures, exams and a "salad days" social life in a single bundle. Now online provision is transforming higher education, giving the best universities a chance to widen their catch, opening new opportunities for the agile, and threatening doom for the laggard and mediocre. The roots are decades old. Britain's Open University started teaching via radio and television in 1971, the for-profit University of Phoenix has been teaching online since 1989; MIT and others have been posting lectures on the internet for a decade.