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"If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford\u2019s Model-T production line or even the bicycle. The list goes on.\nNow answer this one: What\u2019s been the single biggest innovation in education?\nDon\u2019t worry if you come up blank. You\u2019re supposed to. The question is a gambit used by Anant Agarwal, the computer scientist named this year to head edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the web, free, to anyone who wants one. His point: It\u2019s rare to see major technological advances in how people learn.\nAgarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it\u2019s now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.\nOnline education isn\u2019t new\u2014in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time \"distance learning\" programs. What\u2019s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. \nIn the stories that will follow in this month\u2019s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the \u201Cmassive open online courses,\u201D or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent \n\nSEE ALSO: The Crisis in Higher Education\nThese ideas affect markets so large that their value is difficult to quantify. Just consider that a quarter of the American population, 80 million people, is enrolled in K\u201312 education, college, or graduate school. Direct expenditures by government exceed $800 billion. Add to that figure private education and corporate training.\nBecause education is economically important yet appears inefficient and static with respect to technology, it\u2019s often cited (along with health care) as the next industry ripe for a major \u201Cdisruption.\u201D This belief has been promoted by Clayton Christensen, the influential Harvard Business School professor who coined the term \u201Cdisruptive technology.\u201D In two books on education, he laid a blueprint for online learning: It will continue to spread and get better, and eventually it will topple many ideas about how we teach\u2014and possibly some institutions as well.\nIn Christensen\u2019s view, disruptive technologies find success initially in markets \u201Cwhere the alternative is nothing.\u201D This accounts for why online learning is already important in the adult education market (think low-end MBAs and nursing degrees). It also explains the sudden rise of organizations such as Khan Academy, the nonprofit whose free online math videos have won funding from Bill Gates and adoring attention from the media. Khan gained its first foothold among parents who couldn\u2019t afford $125 an hour for a private math tutor. For them, Salman Khan, the charming narrator of the videos, was a plausible substitute.\nKhan\u2019s simple videos aren\u2019t without their critics, who wonder whether his tutorials really teach math so well. \u201CWe agree 100% we aren\u2019t going to solve education\u2019s problems,\u201D Khan responds. But he says the point to keep in mind is that technology-wise, \u201CWe\u2019re in the top of the first inning.\u201D He\u2019ll be pouring about $10 million a year into making his videos better\u2014already there are embedded exercises and analytics that let teachers track 50 or 100 students at once. Pretty soon, Khan told me, his free stuff \u201Cwill be as good or better than anything anyone is charging money for.\u201D\nDigital instruction faces limits. Online, you will never smell a burning resistor or get your hands wet in a biology lab. Yet the economics of distributing instruction over the web are so favorable that they seem to threaten anyone building a campus or hiring teachers. At edX, Agarwal says, the same three-person team of a professor plus assistants that used to teach analog circuit design to 400 students at MIT now handles 10,000 online and could take a hundred times more.\n\n\nSo where are we on the online education curve? According to a study from Babson College, the number of U.S. college students who took at least one online course increased from 1.6 million in 2002 to 6.1 million, or about a third of all college students, in 2010. The researchers, I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, found signs that the growth rate of online classes might be starting to slow. But their study didn\u2019t anticipate the sudden entry of premier universities into online education this year. Coursera, an alliance between Stanford and two dozen other schools, claims that it had 1.5 million students sign up.\nEven though only a small fraction of those will actually complete a class, the rise of the MOOCs means we can begin thinking about how free, top-quality education could change the world. Khan\u2019s videos are popular in India, and the MOOC purveyors have found that 60% of their sign-ups are self-starters from knowledge-hungry nations like Brazil and China. Nobody knows what a liberal application of high-octane educational propellant might do. Will it supersize innovation globally by knocking away barriers to good instruction? Will frightened governments censor teachers as they have the web?\nTechnology will define where online education goes next. All those millions of students clicking online can have their progress tracked, logged, studied and probably influenced, too. Talk to Khan or anyone behind the MOOCs (which largely sprang from university departments interested in computer intelligence) and they\u2019ll all say their eventual goal isn\u2019t to stream videos but to perfect education through the scientific use of data. Just imagine, they say, software that maps an individual\u2019s knowledge and offers a lesson plan unique to him or her.\nWill they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we\u2019ll have the answer to our question: Online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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