by Fiona Black, Director of Academic Planning

Thanks to MP3 technology, people can now buy exactly the songs they want—anytime, anywhere. As the recording industry scrambles to catch up to the wants of its customers, we, in the post-secondary education world, should be doing the same, for our MP3 is the massive open online course (mooc), and our iTunes is Udacity, an education startup.

As we’ve seen with Wikipedia, there is such a huge demand for knowledge that good, free online courses can attract extraordinary numbers of students from all over the world. This has some academics worried about quality. Read Clay Shirky’s article called Higher education: our MP3 is the mooc to find out more and then tell us your thoughts.