I think online "course" is a tricky self definition to start with. A more natural starting point is textbooks. IE MOOCs should aim to use technology to make tex

I think online "course" is a tricky self definition to start with. A more natural starting point is textbooks. IE MOOCs should aim to use technology to make textbooks 10X better. Textbooks can be used in the context of a university course or for self study. If they are good enough, they can enable new kinds of use cases. Imagine that there was an online resource for math that is perfect. Lectures, exercises, hints, spaced learning, badges, etc. Everything from high school level studies to the math classes required for Science and engineering Masters degrees. It's so good that not creating your course around it is just being wasteful. You might be able to add value to that by creating a disciplined environment where people study in the same room or are required to have assignment X completed by 16:00 daily. Maybe you can improve (I suspect you can) on the results of self learning by adding in person tutoring. At that point, a teacher might offer her own course. A 4-1 teacher to student ratio is much more affordable if you only need 5 hours per week. This is where the disruption comes from. So basically I think that "disrupting Universities" is a kind of awkward way of thinking about this. It means online learning are looking at universities and asking themselves how can I replace this, instead of trying to do textbooks 2.0.