The New School of Learning

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Today's No. 1 most-emailed article on the New York Times website is "Universities Reshaping Education on the Web," and it mostly details the growing trends among colleges to post content online that is free for anyone to access.

This "seismic shift" in online learning is embodied by the company Coursera, which provides free online courses to hundreds of thousands of students and will announce more than a dozen research universities have agreed to add to the offerings.

Online education is somewhat akin to the canary in the coal mine for colleges and universities, and it's particularly an odd pairing to the traditional curricular model. As higher ed institutions are scrambling to defend tuition increases that outpace inflation, they're also panicking at posting the very product they offer online for no charge whatsoever. (Most online courses are not for credit--however, Coursera, as mentioned in the Times article, will begin offering some courses for credit.)

Will online ed overturn the old models? Will it put some colleges or universities out of business? Feel free to comment below.