Five professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have some answers. They released a white paper yesterday called “Ideas For Designing An Affordable New Educational Institution,” where they lay out a framework for essentially a new class of university that would take advantage of various trends that have emerged in the past few years. In part, this adopts a model some MIT professors already use, called a Small Private Online Course, or SPOC—a customized adaption of the Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, that sparked wide attention a decade ago. Diana Henderson, one of the white paper’s authors and a literature professor at MIT, says that the ideal would be for professors at this new type of university to be encouraged to spend part of their research time adapting and adding to rich lecture videos and other materials that other professors have already published to the internet—a riff on the concept of customizable open educational resources.
