Students anywhere are being offered free instruction online. What will that do to the trillion-dollar education business?

If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Fords Model-T production line, or even the bicycle. The list goes on.

Now answer this one: whats been the single biggest innovation in education?

Dont worry if you come up blank. Youre supposed to. The question is a gambit used by Anant Agarwal, the computer scientist named this year to head edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, to anyone who wants one. His point: its rare to see major technological advances in how people learn.

Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, its now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.

Online education isnt newin the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time "distance learning" programs. Whats different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this months business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see The Crisis in Higher Education).

These ideas affect markets so large that their value is difficult to quantify. Just consider that a quarter of the American population, 80 million people, is enrolled in K12 education, college, or graduate school. Direct expenditures by government exceed $800 billion. Add to that figure private education and corporate training.

Because education is economically important yet appears inefficient and static with respect to technology, its often cited (along with health care) as the next industry ripe for a major disruption. This belief has been promoted by Clayton Christensen, the influential Harvard Business School professor who coined the term disruptive technology. In two books on education, he laid a blueprint for online learning: it will continue to spread and get better, and eventually it will topple many ideas about how we teachand possibly some institutions as well.

In Christensens view, disruptive technologies find success initially in markets where the alternative is nothing. This accounts for why online learning is already important in the adult education market (think low-end MBAs and nursing degrees). It also explains the sudden rise of organizations such as Khan Academy, the nonprofit whose free online math videos have won funding from Bill Gates and adoring attention from the media. Khan gained its first foothold among parents who couldnt afford $125 an hour for a private math tutor. For them, Salman Khan, the charming narrator of the videos, was a plausible substitute.

Khans simple videos arent without their critics, who wonder whether his tutorials really teach math so well. We agree 100 percent we arent going to solve educations problems, Khan responds. But he says the point to keep in mind is that technology-wise, were in the top of the first inning. Hell be pouring about $10 million a year into making his videos betteralready there are embedded exercises and analytics that let teachers track 50 or 100 students at once. Pretty soon, Khan told me, his free stuff will be as good or better than anything anyone is charging money for.

The rest is here:
The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years