MOOCs: Education for Everyone

By Austin Lee — Posted on: Mar 16, 2015

Imagine a future where anyone with internet access can pick and choose the post-secondary education they want from any university around the world they like, at any time, for free. That future is already here.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are fully online courses that offer course materials such as filmed lectures, and readings. Top-tier universities around the world have created MOOCs on a wide range of topics, from introduction to computer science to a literary analysis to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. MOOCs are free and open to anyone with internet access, so a teenager from Nairobi and a retiree in Helsinki could both find themselves signed up for a MOOC by the University of Calgary.

The simple idea of free, open online college courses has been stirring up a storm in the education world. Why should students pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to take Physics 101 at MIT when they offer the exact same course for free as a MOOC? Many argue that the value of a traditional post-secondary degree happens between and outside lectures, and that experience cannot be substituted by simply watching videos and doing problem sets. On the other hand, MOOCs makes higher education accessible to people who otherwise would not have the means to engage in the traditional university experience. For example, UBC recently concluded a MOOC on Reconciliation through Indigenous Education, a topic of special interest to Indigenous community members in Canada and around the world. The free and open nature of MOOCs allowed these community members to enroll and participate in the course without having to relocate to UBC’s Vancouver campus and paying tuition and housing fees.

Regardless of whether or not MOOCs will ever be able to replace traditional delivery models for higher education, people are recognizing the powerful and disruptive force that MOOCs represent. Large organizations like the US White House and Microsoft are publicly acknowledging and even creating their own MOOCs to rapidly distribute knowledge to the online world. People are excited about the future of MOOCs. If you haven’t already, you should trying taking one too!

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