&gt; One fundamental question is what a MOOC can bring to a literature or a history class and I&#x27;m not sure I have a good answer.<p>[...]<p>&gt; Is it engaging video&#x2F;multimedia&#x2F;high quality lecture? Well, maybe but how is this now different from a quality PBS or History Channel series (or iTunes University or one of those Great Courses DVDs you can order)? Broadcast is a solved problem. Want to learn about the Civil War? Watch the Ken Burns series.<p>To some degree yes, the advantage of MOOCs can be precisely that on a bigger scale we can use higher quality approaches. Local &#x27;meet-ups&#x27; with professors or the like could be used in combination. Why not outsource the lecture part, or at least a significant amount of it? At the very least this could take care of all the &lt;topic&gt; 101 classes that I suspect are pretty similar across universities.<p>But more importantly, I think there&#x27;s a <i>ton</i> of stuff that computers can do in this area other than broadcast. Think of classics like the &quot;Encarta Encyclopedia&quot;, or &quot;The Way Things Work&quot;, or consider how games like Assassin&#x27;s Creed result in tons of gamers learning a lot about certain periods in history.<p>Or consider this recent post on HN, &quot;The Pixel Factory&quot;(<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;acko.net&#x2F;files&#x2F;gltalks&#x2F;pixelfactory&#x2F;online.html#0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;acko.net&#x2F;files&#x2F;gltalks&#x2F;pixelfactory&#x2F;online.html#0</a>).<p>The problems are cost and ability. A single teacher or university is not going to create interactive visualizations, 3D environments to explore, or &#x27;games&#x27; (place-events-or-persons-on-the-timeline?). He doesn&#x27;t have the time&#x2F;interest&#x2F;money, and unlike someone already working in IT he might not have a clue as to what&#x27;s possible (or how to do it).<p>With MOOCs, it should be possible to scale these efforts and bring together some of the best teachers with some of the best tech folk and create something that can be vastly superior to regular classes, and something that has a wider reach.