MOOC: the degradation of our predictive ability

After the growth of the hype of MOOC around the world, we now enter the next phase of MOOC, in which experimentation and implementation of MOOC are to be examined and analysed. 
     An objective perspective, which sometimes tends to be skeptic, has recently led me to think that MOOC can be seen as the result of the degradation of our predictive ability in the education field.

First I want to begin my discussion by hypothesizing that every technology-enabled product has been created at the intersection of technological development (what technologies can do) and our expectation for better life.
     No one doubts this relationship because humans develop technologies, and I also think people tacitly share that next-generation products should be the ones that go just a bit cooler than what we have in society now (see Fig. 1 ). Let's say communication technologies. People have created new technological products bit by bit from telegraph to smartphones. This gradual changes have enable citizens to gradually adapt to new technologies (of course technological determinism has always existed).

Figure 1. Relationship and flow of technological 

developments and human's expectation

Then what about MOOC?
     MOOC are of course one actualisation of the relationship, except the fact that MOOC just have gone too far. The goal of MOOC, which is to educate the world with free online courses, goes beyond our expectation for the education in next generation. The idea of MOOC is not a gradual change from what we had before, and people cannot simply adapt to this super form of education (see Fig. 2). That's why MOOC bring many problems and fears into our traditional education systems, and that's why we've had a lot of hype.

Figure 2. The relationship between technological 

development and human's expectation of MOOC

Why did it happen? The reason might be the lack of previous tech-related historical events in education fields. We haven't seen any gradual "big" changes in our education for many years. The education-has-not-changed-for-hundreds-of-years argument works here in a way that it supports my view that we have lost our predictive ability of foreseeing educational trends. We cannot predict correctly what future education is like and should be like due to the lack of previous cases.
Thus, new technologies, developed by humans, mispredicted the next form of education and there was no tacit consensus between our expectation and what technologies can do.

By taking MOOC in this way, we'll see that MOOC are just kind of the ultimate ideal form of future education because what MOOC are holding up does not seem to reflect the reality. It's just too far from here. So, MOOC's "failure" is not what we lament for, nor what we should be surprised of (the fact that people call it "failure" ensures the deterioration of predictive ability in education).
     And hence, what we are struggling around MOOC, including flipped classroom using MOOC and MOOC-based textbooks, is not the "utilization" of MOOC, but just one of the points in the process of actualizing what MOOC is saying to do. 

Finally, please keep in mind that I am not trying to say that the MOOC's idea is all about bad things for humans and our education. Instead, it does have many good aspects. This "big" change in education has made us excited and engaged, and MOOC became the motivation for re-thinking what education is and what it should be. "What kind of values universities have?" "Why do we continue to pay for college?" "How college degrees work in societies?"
     Now that we have our ideal, ultimate, and beautiful form of education in the future, why not try to reconstruct our education and gradually catch up with what technologies can do?