The Pursuit of Profit or Prestige

Lara Pheatt

Disruptive innovations are used to lower costs and augment access to high-quality, affordable higher education, but little systematic research is available on the topic. Higher education institutions use disruptive innovations to save students time and money. To understand the process of disruptive innovation, I investigated the rapid diffusion of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which are free or low-cost college courses available online. Specifically, I examined the drivers of disruptive innovation over time and by institution type, and augmented the existing theory on the diffusion of disruptive innovation in higher education. The key for this systematic study was to have a dataset that encompassed a large sample of adopters and non-adopters. I constructed a new dataset merging 4 years of IPEDS data with MOOC data (n = 1,470). Analytically, I used competing drivers of...