ABSTRACT
Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U) was originally conceived as a sandbox for experimenting with new educational technologies. C21U began negotiating with Udacity and Coursera. Those agreements were important to a longer-term strategy to make a substantial fraction of Georgia Tech's course catalog available in MOOC format. Unlike many other universities, the Georgia Tech online strategy was not being defined by the administration. We believed that, much as commoditized content enabled by the Internet had disrupted industries over the past 20 years, higher education also was headed for a period of disruptive innovation. In early 2011, C21U joined Athabasca University's George Siemens and his colleagues in planning a 30-week online course entitled "Change 11"; massive open online courses (MOOC) that were intended to showcase technology-induced change in higher education. The experiment was an online master's degree in computer science (OMS) based entirely on free delivery using MOOCs.
