MOOCs are serving mainly the “haves”–though perhaps the ATM analogy may prove right in the long run.
MOOCs came onto the education tech scene with two major objects: to pry open expensive, elite education for the underprivileged in the U.S. and abroad, and to reshape the default medium of that education for everyone else as well. The idea was that students previously unable to go to college would jump at the opportunity for free online education.
Simultaneously a significant share of the regular college demographic would opt for high-quality free courses over pricey credentials at campus. That exodus would undermine admissions in brick and mortar institutions, many of which would collapse. Stanford president John Hennessey warned of the coming tsunami about to batter academia to bits.
Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford prof and Google engineer who invented the self-driving car before launching his MOOC company Udacity, predicted that within fifty years, the higher education establishment would crumble to a paltry ten institutions, with MOOCs becoming the dominant model.
Thrun’s predictions were probably the most radically optimistic of the group, but the idealism of the others wasn’t too far behind.
“We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education that has so far been available to a select few,” reads Coursera’s vision statement. “We aim to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.” EdX, the Harvard-MIT partnership, governs itself by three goals, the first of which is, boldly, to “expand access to education for everyone.”
The other two goals, “enhance teaching and learning on campus and online” and “advance teaching and learning through research,” get to the heart of the MOOC movement: figuring out how to make massive Internet courses realistic for higher ed at large.
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