Will MOOCs transform medicine?

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have received a lot of attention in recent months. They are being variously credited with everything from improving social mobility to transforming the economics of education. As one essayist wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, “In an era with a perfect video-delivery platform [online], why would anyone waste precious class time on a lecture?” (doi:10.1056/NEJMp1202451) The premise of MOOCs is implicit in the name—online …