The first two chapters in the MOOC story have been written: heroic arrival and unbounded enthusiasm followed by disappointment and backlash. I argued in Fall 2012 that for liberal arts colleges at least the real future is in what this article calls SPOCs (small private online classes). I’ve experimented with this form both last year and this. MOOCs are like the Apollo space program – the benefits were not in getting to the moon but in all the tools that smart people invented in order to get to the moon.
