[sanderjd]

I think the future of education will look very different from both "lectures and interaction in classrooms" and "lectures and interaction online". The more lecture-based material is, the more successful it is to present it online, while the more interaction-based material is, the more it makes sense to be in an actual room with other students.

I'm not sure whether bricks-and-mortar universities or pure-online companies like Coursera are better positioned to transition to this hybrid approach. Universities already have it, but at a price point and class size more similar to a full on-campus program than a fully online program. They already have classrooms and TAs, but they have a lot of overhead. Online companies may actually be in a better position to figure out how to scale courses with an offline component across the country while keeping costs reasonable.