Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke University whose MOOC on the History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education just ended, describes her motivation for teaching such a course. We “wanted to see if the 18,000-plus participants who ended up registering for the course could help galvanize a movement on behalf of educational changes that any professor, department, or school could begin to carry out today.” She examines some of the impacts of the MOOC and concludes that “it takes infrastructure, planning, and human labor to make real change. I believe parts of this could be replicated by anyone wishing to create a real-world movement from a MOOC.”
http://chronicle.com/blogs/future/2014/03/14/changing-higher-education-to-change-the-world/