Ten years ago, in May 2012, Harvard and MIT announced the launch of edX, their nonprofit platform for Massive Open Online Courses (better known by the acronym MOOCs). Together with Coursera and Udacity (both launched in the first months of 2012), these three platforms promised to make “the best education in the world freely accessible to any person,” as Coursera put it in their mission statement. The New York Times called 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” and the Chronicle of Higher Education covered “MOOC mania.” The promise of MOOCs and the principle of open access with global reach created hype that stretched across the U.S. as well as into Europe.

But in the halls of the United States’ hierarchical and stratified university system, it looked more like MOOC panic—then-Stanford president John Hennessy warned of a “tsunami,” Udacity co-founder (and former Stanford professor) Sebastian Thrun predicted that only 10 higher education institutions would survive the MOOC revolution, and the University of Virginia even seemingly ousted its president (however briefly) for failing to jump on the bandwagon.

In 2022, MOOCs are no longer a buzzword, and most of these promises and fears have gone unrealized. A decade on, what can the MOOC story—and the way it diverged between the U.S. and Europe—tell us about the future of online education?

At the beginning of the MOOC hype, American MOOC founders shared a missionary spirit, a set of charitable goals—and a belief that computational media technologies could fix everything, including long-standing social problems such as unequal access to education. Images portraying students of color in rural villages and young Afghani girls in their homes populated the homepages of major providers and their launching videos. Ironically, prestigious private universities characterized by high selectivity and high tuition fees became the first promoters of an educational model that promised to remove the same barriers to access that had shaped them.

The mainstream, U.S.-based MOOCs originated from bottom-up initiatives led by charismatic computer science professors whose faith in the salvational potential of technology paired well with the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. Some of these organizations followed for-profit business models from the outset (Udacity, Coursera) while others (notably edX) slowly drifted toward market-oriented solutions over time. A few years in, all of these providers had introduced paywalls and limited access to course materials to paying subscribers.

While most of the leading American platforms progressively lost the first “O” of their acronym—the one that stands for “open”—European initiatives have tended to favor learning experimentation, enlarging the audience of potential users, and preserving cultural and linguistic diversity as well as accessibility and openness. (An exception is Future Learn, the UK-based platform that ranks among the top three MOOC providers globally and follows typical market principles.) In Europe, governments played an active and participatory role in MOOCs from the beginning, and higher education institutions opted not to outsource their online courses, instead relying on a mix of pan-European aggregators, country-level initiatives, and single university initiatives.

In 2013, for example, the French government—led by the Ministry of Higher Education and three other public organizations—launched a national initiative called France Université Numérique (FUN), a clearinghouse for hundreds of MOOCS from French universities and educational institutions. FUN continues to use open-source learning systems and to serve both French students and those outside the country, including via a recently created Moroccan platform. In Italy, MOOC platforms release course content under the shareable Creative Commons license; some also post course videos on YouTube. And many European platforms offer courses in English alongside national languages and Arabic. By contrast, American MOOCs do not apply open licenses to their resources, thereby preventing their adaptation, redistribution, or reuse.

The downside to all this diversity in Europe is that it creates a certain degree of confusion about where and how to find courses among novice MOOC learners—a number that grows every year, even if the media hype peaked by the second half of 2013. The number of MOOC students grew for eight years—Class Central, a MOOC aggregator, estimated 16-18 million total enrolled in 2014 and 120 million in 2019. And then, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 and the consequent lockdown policies surged interest in distance online learning to unprecedented levels and helped recast the fate of MOOCs. In April 2020, the three biggest MOOC providers registered as many new learners as they had done in all of 2019, reaching a total of 126 million new users. That number exploded to 220 million in 2021.

But these are not necessarily the students the original MOOC founders claimed they planned to serve. Research has shown that the largest share of users come from affluent countries or neighborhoods, already have high levels of education, and are employed in highly skilled professions. They rely on MOOCs largely for continuing professional training rather than for traditional university courses.

The past decade and the recent resurgence of MOOCs shows that despite their hype waning, MOOCs can be considered anything but a “moment,” an entirely new phenomenon disconnected from the dynamics happening in the society. Rather, MOOCs are the most visible part of a broader trend that concerns the digitalization of many aspects of people’s lives, education included. Now, as mainstream commercial platforms grow alongside less popular but still lively public and less market-oriented platforms, the time is ripe for moving the conversation on MOOCs to a more pragmatic level about whom they best serve, and which platforms—beyond the mainstream—are doing the most interesting and experimental work. As more parts of our lives move online, many questions remain: Will people move away from more traditional models of education? Will online education continue to serve the same type of students, or can its reach expand beyond to new terrain? Will online coursework provide an arena for people around the world to remain plugged-in? And will MOOCs be part of it all?

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MOOCs combine filmed lectures, readings, course material, and online interactions among professors and students—with the goal of reducing costs and expanding access to higher learning. Many MOOCs today already are huge. Andrew Ng, co-founder of the MOOC platform Coursera, used to teach 400 students a year at Stanford, whereas more than 100,000 students registered for his first MOOC on machine learning. Ng calculated he would have had to teach at Stanford for 250 years to reach the same number of students.

But the promise of MOOCs is even bigger than that. Could online courses make real the idea that education is a fundamental human right, regardless of where you live? Ng’s Coursera partner Daphne Koller has argued yes—that MOOCs can educate students all over the world, even identify the next Steve Jobs in a village in Africa.

Right now, the overwhelming majority of MOOC students are Western, white, and well-off. But experiments are emerging to change that. Take the Kepler experiment in Rwanda. Launched by the nonprofit Generation Rwanda in 2013, its goal is to use MOOCs to bring the best of online education to the brightest survivors of the 1994 genocide. Like a young Rwandan woman who lived in refugee camps until the age of 14, and was selected as part of the first group of Rwandans to test business MOOCs offered by the University of Edinburgh.

Generation Rwanda knew that MOOCs weren’t accessible to students in Rwanda. The first cohort didn’t know how to type on a computer and spoke limited English; they certainly didn’t have the academic background to take college-level courses. So Generation Rwanda lined up American expats in Kigali as mentors. While the program is still working out the kinks, it already can claim success: 49 of its first class of 50 students have graduated.

NGO-university partnerships like Kepler represent an agenda somewhere between educational access and international development. But what might we learn from Kepler about MOOCs and the right to an education in the U.S., where, similar to Rwanda, a persistent underclass lacks access to quality education that might lead not just to better lives for individuals, but to better lives for families and whole communities?

At Cornell University, we tried an experiment to answer questions about MOOCs’ capacity to build stronger communities in America. We designed a MOOC that was different from the business, information technology, and engineering MOOCs that aim to lift up Rwandans and other poor students in developing countries. Our MOOC—Reclaiming Broken Places: Introduction to Civic Ecology—is an exploration of grassroots environmental stewardship. In particular, we want the students to explore why people spontaneously “reclaim” broken places—like vacant lots in Detroit where residents plant community gardens and street trees; beaches destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in New York, where volunteers rebuild sand dunes to protect their shoreline; or polluted streams in Washington, D.C., where young people remove trash. Because many people who reclaim broken places live in the communities where these places scar the landscape, we wanted to see how we could make our MOOC accessible to these same communities and their environmental stewards.

The participants in our experiment were not young people who might be the next Steve Jobs. Rather they were middle-aged African-American ladies in low-income housing in Anacostia (a Washington neighborhood), Latino elders in Providence, Rhode Island, and immigrant and African-American community leaders in Queens, N.Y. Following the Kepler model, we decided that in order to access the MOOC content, these individuals would need local mentors—people living in the communities we were targeting who could understand the lectures and readings. Then we set about answering the question: How do mentors shape access, learning, and local action when people in low-income communities participate in a MOOC?

Our students were not trying to earn a degree. They were what we call “free-choice learners”—people who choose what they want to learn—like visitors to zoos and museums, and adults taking a MOOC just because they’re interested. And for the most part, after watching a couple of the video lectures, the students in our local groups chose not to follow the intended MOOC pathway. Instead of listening to the lectures and reading the materials, they preferred to hear their mentors explain the ideas about how people reclaim broken places because of their love for life and love for the places where they live, and about how planting gardens or trees can bring people and help bring back a sense of community. The students then discussed how the ideas applied to their own broken places—the neighborhoods where they lived. And they planned actions to reclaim the broken places in their own communities.

The mentors—Akiima Price and Xavier Brown in Washington, Bryce DuBois in Providence, and Anandi Premlall in Queens—added their own touch to the lessons. Anandi used a film about the destruction of an urban farm in South Los Angeles as a jumping-off point to debate struggles around urban open space. And Akiima invited her students to share stories about losing sons and nephews to gun violence, as a way to introduce the concept of broken places. By discussing the course content—or the content as interpreted by the local mentors—the students learned a few things about ecosystem services, environmental governance, and sense of place and sense of community. And they came to realize the larger meanings of—and how to get involved with—grassroots greening efforts.

One way to think about our experiment is that the MOOC acted as a community-organizing tool to help participants identify things they wanted to see changed in their neighborhoods. In Providence, the senior citizens who participated in our MOOC are now working to convince the housing authority to allow them to grow their own food in a housing project garden. In Anacostia, participants are beginning to cultivate planting boxes to memorialize loved ones killed by violence. And the group in Queens launched 103 seed bombs—a mixture of dirt, compost, and wildflower seeds—to reclaim vacant lots.

So what does our experiment—along with experiments in Rwanda and other developing countries—tell us about MOOCs?

Andrew Ng shared a vision for what MOOCs can do: “I want to live in a world where students no longer have to choose between paying for tuition and paying for groceries. I want to live in a world where a poor kid born in Africa has nearly equality of opportunity as a kid born in the wealthy suburbs in D.C.” Such a world, however, requires more than MOOCs. Educational access in poor communities—whether in Rwanda or Rhode Island—requires mentors to guide students toward getting a business degree or taking action to reclaim their community. And mentors make MOOCs smaller—mentors will not reach 100,000 students. But mentors may also help make MOOCs larger—not just about educational access for individual students, but a tool for building stronger communities.

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