If video killed the radio star, will it do the same to traditional classroom lectures?

With its first broadcast on August 1, 1981, MTV ushered in a new era of entertainment with the song "Video Killed the Radio Star" as the standard bearer. Likewise, the emergence of edX along with Coursera, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Udacity, and other early-entry MOOCs set a new standard in scholarship by converting classroom lectures into online instructional videos.

Interestingly, the evolution of education from an on-campus experience to an online environment parallels cultural trends such as that of television, where viewership is rapidly migrating away from traditional providers to online options. People prefer watching Netflix to network shows, streaming Hulu instead of watching shows according to a schedule, and spending hours watching YouTube from the convenience of their mobile devices.

In a victory for "cord cutters", cable television network HBO launched HBO NOW, a streaming...