A hundred years ago, higher education seemed on the verge of a technological revolution. The spread of a powerful new communication networkthe modern postal systemhad made it possible for universities to distribute their lessons beyond the bounds of their campuses. Anyone with a mailbox could enroll in a class. Frederick Jackson Turner, the famed University of Wisconsin historian, wrote that the "machinery" of distance learning would carry "irrigating streams of education into the arid regions" of the country. Sensing a historic opportunity to reach new students and garner new revenues, schools rushed to set up correspondence divisions. By the 1920s, postal courses had become a full-blown mania. Four times as many people were taking them as were enrolled in all the nation's colleges and universities combined.

The hopes for this early form of distance learning went well beyond broader access. Many educators believed that correspondence courses would be better than traditional on-campus instruction because assignments and assessments could be tailored specifically to each student. The University of Chicago's Home-Study Department, one of the nation's largest, told prospective enrollees that they would "receive individual personal attention," delivered "according to any personal schedule and in any place where postal service is available." The department's director claimed that correspondence study offered students an intimate "tutorial relationship" that "takes into account individual differences in learning." The education, he said, would prove superior to that delivered in "the crowded classroom of the ordinary American University."

We've been hearing strikingly similar claims today. Another powerful communication networkthe Internetis again raising hopes of a revolution in higher education. This fall, many of the country's leading universities, including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, are offering free classes over the Net, and more than a million people around the world have signed up to take them. These "massive open online courses," or MOOCs, are earning praise for bringing outstanding college teaching to multitudes of students who otherwise wouldn't have access to it, including those in remote places and those in the middle of their careers. The online classes are also being promoted as a way to bolster the quality and productivity of teaching in generalfor students on campus as well as off. Former U.S. secretary of education William Bennett has written that he senses "an Athens-like renaissance" in the making. Stanford president John Hennessy told the New Yorker he sees "a tsunami coming."

The excitement over MOOCs comes at a time of growing dissatisfaction with the state of college education. The average price tag for a bachelor's degree has shot up to more than $100,000. Spending four years on campus often leaves young people or their parents weighed down with big debts, a burden not only on their personal finances but on the overall economy. And many people worry that even as the cost of higher education has risen, its quality has fallen. Dropout rates are often high, particularly at public colleges, and many graduates display little evidence that college improved their critical-thinking skills. Close to 60 percent of Americans believe that the country's colleges and universities are failing to provide students with "good value for the money they and their families spend," according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center. Proponents of MOOCs say the efficiency and flexibility of online instruction will offer a timely remedy.

Data from Institute of Education Sciences and Pew Research Center.

But not everyone is enthusiastic. The online classes, some educators fear, will at best prove a distraction to college administrators; at worst, they will end up diminishing the quality of on-campus education. Critics point to the earlier correspondence-course mania as a cautionary tale. Even as universities rushed to expand their home-study programs in the 1920s, investigations revealed that the quality of the instruction fell short of the levels promised and that only a tiny fraction of enrollees actually completed the courses. In a lecture at Oxford in 1928, the eminent American educator Abraham Flexner delivered a withering indictment of correspondence study, claiming that it promoted "participation" at the expense of educational rigor. By the 1930s, once-eager faculty and administrators had lost interest in teaching by mail. The craze fizzled.

Is it different this time? Has technology at last advanced to the point where the revolutionary promise of distance learning can be fulfilled? We don't yet know; the fervor surrounding MOOCs makes it easy to forget that they're still in their infancy. But even at this early juncture, the strengths and weaknesses of this radically new form of education are coming into focus.

Rise of the MOOCs

"I had no clue what I was doing," Sebastian Thrun says with a chuckle, as he recalls his decision last year to offer Stanford's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course free online. The 45-year-old robotics expert had a hunch that the class, which typically enrolls a couple of hundred undergraduates, would prove a draw on the Net. After all, he and his co-professor, Peter Norvig, were both Silicon Valley stars, holding top research posts at Google in addition to teaching at Stanford. But while Thrun imagined that enrollment might reach 10,000 students, the actual number turned out to be more than an order of magnitude higher. When the class began, in October 2011, some 160,000 people had signed up.

The experience changed Thrun's life. Declaring "I can't teach at Stanford again," he announced in January that he was joining two other roboticists to launch an ambitious educational startup called Udacity. The venture, which bills itself as a "21st-century university," is paying professors from such schools as Rutgers and the University of Virginia to give open courses on the Net, using the technology originally developed for the AI class. Most of the 14 classes Udacity offers fall into the domains of computer science and mathematics, and Thrun says it will concentrate on such fields for now. But his ambitions are hardly narrow: he sees the traditional university degree as an outdated artifact and believes Udacity will provide a new form of lifelong education better suited to the modern labor market.

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The Crisis in Higher Education