THE VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY: IMPACT ON AUSTRALIAN ACCOUNTING AND BUSINESS EDUCATION 86 1. In the 1950s, television network CBS, in partnership with New York University, broadcast full college courses at 6 am. In addition to the 177 for-credit students who took the irst course, another 120,000 people took it without credit (Green, 2013). INTRODUCTION Are massive open online courses (MOOCs) the monster they have been made out to be? Or can they be domesticated? In this paper we consider the possibilities for teaching Australian accounting students effectively in an environment characterised by ageing academics, increasing teaching costs, reduced funding and impending threats from ubiquitous MOOCs. Based on a review of the literature and relections on our own experiences, we make observations about the implications of the rapid expansion of MOOCs for stakeholders in accounting education, and we offer suggestions to accounting academics as to how they might make the most effective use of technology. The rationale for this paper stems from the massive media attention given to MOOCs during the past year, much of which was somewhat alarmist (Dodd, 2013). Triggered by technological advances, ‘the collapse of higher education as we know it’ was purported to arise from the extreme competition meted out by MOOCs offered by prestigious brand-name universities, and new consortia with MOOC platforms (Sams, 2012). In the paper, we argue that the scenario is not quite so threatening. MOOCs are the latest in a long line of technologies to support distance education that started with books and proceeded through television, the irst wave of computers and the Internet – all of which were predicted to result in organisational failure and even formal learning. 1 But MOOCs are more than just another technology tool. We endeavour to provide an even- handed evaluation of the potential impact of MOOCs for accounting education. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a brief review of the literature relating to MOOCs and other forms of technology-enhanced learning. Section 3 considers some possible effects of MOOCs on stakeholders in Australian accounting higher education. Section 4 details technology-enhanced strategies as examples that accounting academics can adopt to enhance student learning in this context. Section 5 contains some concluding remarks and thoughts about future research. LITERATURE REVIEW The driving question in this paper is: how, as accounting academics, can we best respond to MOOCs? In this section we conine ourselves to literature that addresses two subsidiary questions: 1) What are MOOCs and how do they matter?; and 2) What is the potential for online teaching in accounting education? Milking MOOCs: Towards the Right Blend in Accounting Education MARK FREEMAN AND PHIL HANCOCK