The promotion of online education platforms that make learning from high-profile universities, including Stanford and Harvard available to the masses are turning educational qualifications into a product which can be bought, traded or sold, according to a new book that challenges the ethics of such sites.
Charles Darwin University (CDU) digital initiatives expert Dr Seb Dianati is an academic lead in the Learning Futures team within Education Strategy at the university and recently published The Commercialisation of Massive Open Online Courses: Reading Ideologies in Between the Lines.
The book explores how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have transitioned from focusing on delivering free and inclusive education to becoming for-profit enterprises, with the research exploring platforms such as Coursera, edX, Udacity, and Udemy.
From inclusive to paywalled
Since 2011, when the USA’s Stanford University became the world’s first leading tertiary education institution to make a free course accessible to millions, many online platforms have shifted from being educational pioneers to commercial entities. The new book aims to shed light on how the noble initiative of accessible education became commodified.
Today, Coursera, edX and Udemy offer courses from world-leading universities and companies such as Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Google, Meta and more, while Udacity offers courses developed with brands that include Amazon, Accenture and Microsoft.
In the book, Dianati examines how the educational motives and ideologies of these platforms have evolved over more than a decade.
“For instance, on one website it went from ‘take the world’s best courses, for free’ to ‘take the world’s best courses’,” says Dianati, who believes the messaging on these websites promotes a two-tier education system that is masked by rhetoric of agency, autonomy and accessibility.
This system, he says, divides learners into those who need to find value in their MOOCs and those who participate in a traditional education system.
By challenging the perspective of learners as mere economic units and advocating for an educational model that empowers individuals to become critical, socially conscious citizens, rather than just consumers of education for profit or personal gain, Dianati hopes to inspire sustainable change.
“If university leaders truly aim to democratise education, they must first examine and reform their own approaches to online learning,” he says.
“The fading promise of ‘free’ education on major platforms signals a need to question their underpinning ideologies. Change in university practices towards MOOCs should embody a commitment to dismantling barriers, not erecting paywalls that hinder the spread of knowledge.”
