As MOOC mania approached its peak in 2012, Anant Agarwal, the president of the Massive Open Online Course platform edX, claimed:
Online education for students around the world will be the next big thing in education. This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press.
The claim was repeated many times. Indeed, 15 years earlier, management guru Peter Drucker had anticipated this:
Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It’s as large a change as when we first got the printed book.
That seemed improbable since university lectures have been as important in the five-and-a-half centuries since Gutenberg invented the printing press as they presumably were for the three-and-a-half centuries before. Yet printing had profound and pervasive effects on society, as has been established by many, notably Elizabeth Eisenstein in her study on The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
In a paper published recently in History of Education, I considered how printing changed universities, such as their lectures and libraries.
How Did Printing Change Lectures?
At least some medieval universities had cursory lectures in which bachelor students read set texts to undergraduates to take notes or dictation. Cursory lectures were necessary when undergraduates did not have access to set texts because manuscripts were far too expensive to be afforded by most students. Printing greatly increased the availability and affordability of texts, thus removing the need for cursory lectures, which were therefore ended at Oxford at least by 1584.
