MOOCs in 2012: Dismantling the Status Quo |e-Literate
Phil Hill smartly digs straight to the point here with his insightful post on the real disruptive innovation of MOOCs.  It's not what you think.  Here's a bite, but worth a read at his site.

The real significance of xMOOCs, in my opinion, is that they are
acting as the foreign element triggering the end of the status quo. The
key method of this change was the removal of the core assumption that
online learning is necessarily inferior to face-to-face education.

This assumption changed when the elite of the elites – Stanford,
Harvard & MIT – publicly declared from the highest levels of the
administration that online learning and educational technology was here
to stay.