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CT asks Anant Agarwal about lifelong learning and how edX connects individuals to education whatever their career or life stage.

This study has received a lot of attention, being reported in many different outlets. The main reporting suggests that discussions in online learning are strongly biased, with more attention being paid to white male students by instructors, and white female students more likely to correspond with or respond to other white females. I don’t dispute these findings, as far as they apply to the 124 MOOCs that the researchers studied.

Where the madness comes in is then generalising this to all online courses. This is like finding that members of drug gangs in Mexico are likely to kill each other so the probability of death by gunfire is the same for all Mexicans.

MOOCs are one specific type of online learning, offered mainly by elitist institutions with predominantly white male faculty delivering the MOOCs. Furthermore, the instructor:student ratio in MOOCs is far higher than in credit-based online learning, which still remains the main form of online learning, despite the nonsense spouted by Stanford, MIT and Harvard about MOOCs. In an edX or Coursera MOOC, with very many students, it is impossible for an instructor to respond to every student. Some form of selection has to take place.

On the 10th anniversary of the first massive open online course, they are more numerous than ever.

In 2008, University of Manitoba professors Stephen Downes and George Siemens taught a course on learning theory that was attended by about 25 paying students in class and by another 2,300 students online for free. Colleague Dave Cormier at the University of Prince Edward Island dubbed the experiment a “massive open online course,” or MOOC.

Since then, this learning mode has been through a dynamic roller-coaster ride. It became an object of much hype (a 2012 New York Times article was titled “The Year of the MOOC”) and then faded from the scene (a 2017 Inside Higher Ed blog post decreed “MOOCs are ‘Dead’”).

Actually, on the 10th anniversary of that first MOOC, they’re still quite alive. “The numbers suggest MOOCs are, in fact, here to stay,” said Arshad Ahmad, vice-provost, teaching and learning, at McMaster University and director of the university’s MacPherson Institute for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Dr. Ahmad also teaches a five-course specialization MOOC called Finance for Everyone.