Have you ever felt like you were "totally out of it," meaning "out of the know" on a subject? That is how I'm feeling when Wendy Freitag mention MOOC to me and it was a totally new term — I had never heard of it. Check out the Wikipedia definition, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).
I do believe we are headed to a time when the average person of modest income will not be able to afford attending a four-five-year higher-education school. Thus, online education will dominate and only the rich will be in the universities, going back to the way it was at the "previous" turn of the century.
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.