One of the great chores of elearning is the Gartner curve. You dread the buzzword for this year, as everyone tears off after it like a crimewatch reconstruction of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. People you thought intelligent disappear into the hills, never to be seen again. Please don’t have nightmares.

Whereas if a few Universities want to spend a fortune on Second Life it doesn’t really matter that much, each to their own – some Universities will have bigger libraries, some nicer unions, some will teach you useful things – it takes all sorts. I worry though that within the MOOC trend is something a little more dangerous.

The semi-hysteria of the Gartner hype is innately a bubble, except a bubble which may long enough to be salvaged for some educational good. But what if the hype comes from a place of criticism, or suggests / tends to a form of Schumpter’s Creative Destruction. Second Life presented rich educational experiences (for some) but wasn’t factored around increasing access or making education scalable. If the MOOC doesn’t work, then we have some big problems / elephants in the room.

That’s fair enough, better to try and fail than not try, but what if there are other issues at play. Most Gartner curves before have been University agnostic, never has the hype curve been focused on the Universities at the highest part of the University league table. 5 of the Times’ top 12 Global Universities are behind MOOCs. This isn’t your atypical Gartner hype curve – it’s a large hadron collider super accelerated Gartner hype curve.

What University isn’t going to want to be involved?

But think topologically – the top 100 Universities in the world are relatively safe. They don’t really need to worry about admissions, many have endowments rich enough to sustain them for many years. I don’t doubt that many lecturers at these Universities can run a MOOC for a handful of weeks, and then promote their probably core-text book to half a million people. It seems foolish not to.

But what of  the University that isn’t quite important enough – a good teacher at a University without sufficient prestige. I don’t quite see the ladder being lifted and those non Ivy league lecturers being left to drown, but it seems that with the “top” Universities driving this, then the role of smaller Universities seems a little obsolete. Neither Udacity or Coursera seems to offer “rival” courses, and this reduces the need for multiple lecturers – but at what point will people opt for the MOOC over the degree, and within the league tables, where does a Harvard MOOC certificate sit in relation to a degree from University X. Harvard can run free courses as a loss leader, or as a philanthropic act but both of those can act to aid market concentration and the reduction of choice (which seems counter-intuitive to scalability) unless the solution is degrees for some and MOOC certificates for others – and that feels a little dangerous.

There is a danger in being left behind, and there is a danger in leaving behind.