Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Kevin Carey for The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 3, 2012). To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo credit: Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle

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In the spring of my freshman year in college, I took “Principles of Microeconomics” in Lecture Hall 1, a 400-seat auditorium. The professor was an economist and thus possessed a certain perspective on human nature. On the first day of class, he explained that our grades would be based on two midterms and a final. If we skipped the first midterm, the second would count double. If we skipped them both, the final would count for 100 percent of our grade. I may or may not have waited until the hour ended before walking out the back door of Lecture Hall 1 toward the nearest bar.

Fifteen weeks later, suddenly mindful of various dire warnings from my father about passing grades, continuing financial support, and the strong connection between them, I cracked my econ textbook and began a five-day cram session fueled by youthful energy and caffeine. When I walked down to the bottom of Lecture Hall 1 to turn in my final exam, one of the teaching assistants told me to place it in a pile corresponding to my course section. I never attended a course section, I replied. I’ll always remember the look of resignation and disgust that crossed his face.

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Massive open online courses are all the rage—even though students receive neither credit nor certification for taking them. Will they transform academe, or are they a flash in the pan? In this package, five observers weigh the impact of MOOC’s.

A few weeks later, I received a letter informing me that I had received a C on the final and thus the course. Accordingly, Binghamton University, a prestigious, regionally accredited research institution, awarded me four academic credits, which I applied toward a bachelor’s degree that I hold today.

Last fall, more than 100,000 people enrolled in a free online version of the renowned Stanford roboticist Sebastian Thrun’s artificial-intelligence course. Many didn’t finish. But some did, and among them, some performed just as well on the assignments and exams as the whip-smart students in Palo Alto who took the course in person. For this, the online students received no official academic credits of any kind.

That doesn’t make any sense.

Over the last year, massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, have quickly traversed the cultural cycle of hype, saturation, backlash, and backlash-to-the-backlash. Like blogs, MOOC’s are interesting, important, and stuck with an absurdly unserious name. But don’t let the silly-sounding moniker fool you. Some new things are praised to the skies because people have a weakness for the shiny and novel. Others are hyped because they will obviously change the world, and it always takes the world a little while to adjust. MOOC’s are of the latter kind.

This became clear not when Thrun and his colleagues enrolled vast legions of learners from around the world. The online Rubicon wasn’t truly crossed until Harvard, which had been studiously ignoring the free online course movement, jumped aboard the bandwagon to become a partner in MIT’s MOOC venture, edX. University officials in Cambridge were clearly anxious about missing the next big thing. Then, a few weeks later, the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors fired its president after reading about MOOC’s in The Wall Street Journal.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Kevin Carey is director of the education-policy program at the New America Foundation. To learn more about him and the Foundation, please click here.

You may also wish to check out Michael Nanfito’s recently published book, MOOCs: Opportunities, Impacts, and Challenges: Massive Open Online Courses in Colleges and Universities, Paperback Edition (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, December 14, 2013)