If the universities are smart and look at the MOOC's not as a competitor but as a partner, then higher-ed can improve. I'm a college student now and one of our school's math classes experimented with flipped teaching. I think the emergence of MOOC's is what largely caused this my school's faculty to seriously consider the meter of online learning, to the point where they were willing to A/B test a required differential equations class. While the first results from MOOC's haven't been what people expected, http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/from-a-million-mooc-u... At least, like one of the comments above said, they're making the established higher ed organizations rethink their practices.