Free college courses online--often from the nation's top professors--must be the greatest innovation ever in education. Or not? The final exam is far from being graded, as questions swirl around the various paradigms being tested by academic institutions and companies. Do massive open online courses--aka MOOCs--undermine traditional college models? Should colleges give credit for them? Who owns the content of a course that a professor prepares with university resources? How do online employment-oriented courses stack up against college classroom programs? What about online students' comparatively poor completion rates? The raft of issues around this moving target, and what they mean for the future of education, are fodder for Niall Ferguson, who is among the nation's most prolific educators, historians and commentators, and Sebastian Thrun, the "godfather of free online education," whose platform reaches millions of students worldwide.

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