Now we know what prompted Chris Bowen to resign as minister. He signed onto O2S Anthrop, checked out the 4 week workload (quite heavy if done with serious attention), fell in love with the intro video, and decided the next few months would be of more value to him learning new stuff than watching the train wreck around him. Given his seat's likely to go in the western sydney avalanche, a few new skills and insights can come in handy. Prof Downey will introduce him to evolutionary biology, which would be very useful in working through the alpha male chimps that inhabit parliament house.

There are a few things about this that I find fascinating:

(1) In Australia such things are launched by ministers. In the US they are simply done without such fanfare. I attribute this to the fact that the activity is not so much aimed at the market but at Canberra. It seems that our universities spend most of their time and energy trying to prove they are valuable to Canberra rather than to the more appropriate stakeholders.

(2) I was recently at a BHERT function on Moocs and found it very interesting that of all the good and great in the audience only 3 people had actually taken a Mooc course. Of course, everyone had opinions, but almost no one (< 3% of the audience) had any actual experience in which to base that opinion.

(3) Also at that function there was a lot of discussion of "disruptive" innovation. In my talk, I indicated that just because innovation is destructive to you does not make in disruptive to the market. Disruptive innovation a la Schumpeter is innovation that negates the advantages of incumbency. However, Moocs are essentially allowing very strong global incumbents (e.g., Stanford) to spread their power. That may be annoying to AU universities but it is not disruptive by the definition of the idea.

(4) Also at that function and in this article there is a lot of hand ringing about "what is the business model?". First, it may be that such a model emerges as the different players try out different approaches and also as the consumer works out what the right standards are. So no one knows and only the risk averse wait around to see what works before moving in. Second, it may be that there is no Mooc business model at all. It is entirely possible that when taken in the portfolio of activities a university like Stanford engages in that they have no real intention on making much at all from that singular activity. Indeed, a lot of the leading universities waste valuable talent doing little more than teaching basic things -- moocs remove the need to waste talent. Rather than being a real "business model" in the sense that AU universities like to use the term (i.e., how do we make money on this?), other more savvy players may be saying "how to we avoid wasting talent on activities that are mundane and commodified?"

(5) Overall, Moocs are a real opportunity for Australia since they allow us to remove a lot of unproductive academic talent from the system. For example, one of the reasons our business schools are so poor intellectually is because we are way past the point of diminishing intellectual returns. We have thousands of students that have to be serviced in a manner that generates the free cash flow the universities need and this leads us to hiring too many people to be intellectually efficient. Moocs allow this to problem to be alleviated while also potentially allowing us to leverage on the small number of truly world class scholars we possess.