Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms

The report of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Online Education Policy Initiative is a new study on online education by Karen Willcox and Sanjay Sarma, co-chairs of the MIT Online Education Policy Initiative. The MIT report looks at the challenge of how both online and blended learning can be optimized by incorporating emerging lessons from learning science, from discipline-based education reforms, and from cognitive science.

The report makes four recommendations:

• Recommendation 1: Increase interdisciplinary collaboration across fields of research in higher education, using an integrated research agenda
• Recommendation 2: Promote online as an important facilitator in higher education
• Recommendation 3: Support the expanding profession of the "Learning Engineer"
• Recommendation 4: Foster institutional and organizational change in higher education to implement these reforms