In Part I, I asked how MOOCs (massive online open courses) are potentially poised to “disrupt” academia thanks to broader structural and economic shifts that need to be addressed independently, while still considering the value of online education. In this second half, I turn towards ways to rethink graduate education as a consequence of changes in academia and the academic job market. —- While MOOCs have become a popular topic of discussion, less attention has been paid to those rethinking the structure of graduate education, to address related issues (including restructuring humanities dissertations  and shortening the length of doctoral programs). Notably, Stanford has been moving forward with an initiative to cut the time-to-degree for humanities programs to five years, by soliciting concrete plans from individual departments in exchange for year-round grad student funding. I can’t speak to whether five years is a reasonable length for humanities Ph.D. programs, but it (read more...)