In the global rush to digitise learning, the word ‘open’ has become synonymous with progress. But not all openness is created equal.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been celebrated as democratising forces, breaking down educational barriers and expanding access worldwide. Yet beneath the appealing rhetoric lies a more complex and more troubling reality.
MOOCs are not the same as open-access learning. They are platformised, proprietary, and often aligned more with profit than pedagogy.
The mirage of MOOC openness
When MOOCs were launched in the early 2010s by institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Harvard, they promised a revolution in global education.
Platforms like Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn offered free courses from top-tier universities, using the language of access, inclusion, and global empowerment. Millions enrolled, governments signed on, and the hype cycle surged.
But the model evolved rapidly into a commercial ecosystem. Courses became ‘freemium’, certificates came with a cost, and platform algorithms optimised engagement for monetisation.
A 2024 study published in Open Praxis analysed MOOCs on the Bilge portal and also noted persistently low completion rates, even after adjusting for engagement. This contextualises past findings and confirms that dropout remains a core issue in MOOCs.
Another study examined 2.3 million learners across 174 MITx courses, Open Praxis. The authors concluded that MOOCs continue to attract learners who are disproportionately older, male, and highly educated, indicating that those who least need open access education often benefit most.
Platform capitalism and data extraction
Today’s MOOCs operate under the logic of platform capitalism. Their governance is centralised, their content is institutionally curated, and their design prioritises scalability and data-driven personalisation over critical engagement.
Behavioural data is mined to enhance stickiness and convert users into paying customers, echoing the broader patterns of surveillance capitalism.
MOOCs promise global learning but often deliver digital franchising. The platforms act more like SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies than educational commons.
The knowledge offered is typically Western, English-language, and linear, with limited adaptability for local contexts. Instead of transforming learning, they simulate the traditional classroom on a digital interface.
MOOCs export knowledge – But seldom import context
MOOCs frequently export Western knowledge without meaningful local context, reinforcing patterns of digital neocolonialism. Their epistemic orientation favours Anglo-American paradigms, reinforcing a form of digital neocolonialism. Scholars such as Walter Mignolo have called this the “coloniality of knowledge”.
Courses on global development, education, or health are frequently written from elite Global North perspectives, with minimal representation of Global South voices or Indigenous knowledge systems. As a result, learners are socialised into accepting one way of knowing, while local traditions are sidelined or omitted entirely.
Language is another barrier. Over 80% of MOOCs are offered in English, excluding millions of learners across the Global South who lack high-level proficiency.
Even in multilingual initiatives like SWAYAM (India) or FUN MOOC (France), the pedagogy often mirrors colonial-era models – top-down, exam-driven, and institutionally guarded.
What true open access learning looks like
In contrast to MOOCs, open-access learning emphasises community, flexibility, and cultural relevance. Rooted in the tradition of knowledge commons, it is marked by community-led curriculum design, multilingual resources, open licensing, and peer-to-peer pedagogy. It values learner agency over credential scalability.
Consider:
The African Storybook Project: enables communities to develop and translate children’s books into local languages.
Refugee-led coding academies in Lebanon: teaching Python through oral storytelling, blending tech with cultural narratives.
Latin American women’s cooperatives: developing digital literacy tools from the ground up.
These are not MOOCs. They are not massive. But they are open in the deepest sense: participatory, situated, and emancipatory.
Case studies from four continents
National MOOC platforms across the globe have adopted distinct strategies to expand access and assert cultural influence. While they differ in form and intention, a common thread runs through their designs: each platform reflects not only a pedagogical model but also a political project – embedding specific values, epistemologies, and power relations into digital learning.
FutureLearn (United Kingdom): Cultural diplomacy through MOOCs
Founded by the Open University and supported by the United Kingdom government, FutureLearn has actively positioned itself as a soft power instrument.
Its initiatives include offering free courses to Afghan women and Ukrainian students during moments of political crisis, framed explicitly as part of broader public diplomacy efforts. These efforts extend Britain’s historical educational outreach, particularly in regions with colonial-era ties.
UK universities partner through the platform to deliver English-language instruction and cultural curricula, reinforcing British influence under the banner of inclusion and humanitarian support. While access is broadened, the epistemic orientation remains largely Anglocentric.
SWAYAM (India): Infrastructure without pedagogical transformation
India’s SWAYAM platform (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) was launched by the Ministry of Education to provide free, multilingual online courses from Indian universities.
It represents a commendable effort to build national digital infrastructure and reduce dependency on foreign edtech platforms.
However, SWAYAM’s pedagogy remains deeply traditional, lecture-based, exam-driven, and focused on institutional authority. While it expands access, the platform’s hidden curriculum emphasises standardised success and individual merit, often marginalising critical pedagogy, learner agency, and cultural plurality.
As a result, SWAYAM preserves rather than transforms prevailing educational hierarchies.
FUN MOOC (France): Linguistic sovereignty and neo-republican education
Launched in 2013 by the French Ministry of Higher Education, France Université Numérique (FUN MOOC) explicitly promotes Francophone education as a form of global cultural outreach.
The platform has deepened ties with former French colonies, particularly through the Francophonie agenda – such as initiatives ahead of the 2024 Villers Cotterêts Summit, and by rolling out localised versions in countries like Morocco and Côte d’Ivoire.
Though its pedagogy often mirrors the centralised, lecture-heavy model of France’s higher education system, FUN MOOC carries a clear decolonising impulse: it prioritises linguistic sovereignty and cultural continuity in the Francophone world.
Yet, it stops short of embracing participatory learning or epistemic plurality, reflecting a neo-republican model of top-down educational dissemination.
Coursera and edX (United States): Market logics and the coloniality of knowledge
US-based MOOC platforms like Coursera and edX (now part of 2U) commercialise elite education at scale, distributing content from institutions such as Stanford and MIT to a global audience.
Backed by Silicon Valley and academic prestige, they promote a hidden curriculum rooted in neoliberal values – self-optimisation, market alignment, and entrepreneurialism.
Learners are framed as individual upskillers in gamified environments, with critical inquiry sidelined. Most content reflects Anglo-American epistemologies, often excluding Global South or Indigenous perspectives.
This reinforces what decolonial scholars call the coloniality of knowledge, where power over learning remains concentrated in the Global North.
The hidden curriculum: What MOOCs really teach
The case studies above illuminate a deeper structural tension: while national MOOC initiatives have succeeded in broadening access and localising content to varying degrees, their true impact hinges less on technical infrastructure and more on the degree of epistemic autonomy they afford.
The central question is not merely what MOOCs deliver, but how they structure the act of learning itself.
Beneath the surface of open access lies a hidden curriculum, one that transmits the cultural logics of self-optimisation, competition, and credentialism. Learning is reframed as a solitary race toward certification, gamified into metrics and milestones.
Reflection gives way to retention; transformation is replaced by task completion. Dialogue, where it exists, is constrained, funnelled through algorithmically managed forums that reward speed and superficiality over sustained inquiry.
In this design, it is not the learner’s context, culture, or curiosity that shapes the learning journey; it is the logic of the platform. Algorithmic personalisation, standardised templates, and institutional branding dictate not only what is taught, but also how, why, and to whom.
The result is a pedagogy of scale; that is, broad in reach but often shallow in depth, optimised for distribution, not for discovery.
This is the paradox of MOOCs: they democratise access to elite content while centralising control over knowledge production. What appears open may, in practice, reinforce old hierarchies, just dressed in the aesthetics of innovation.
Toward a participatory, equitable future
To move beyond this constrained model, we must reimagine digital education as a relational and co-created space – one that values learning as a public good, not a product. That means shifting the paradigm from passive consumption to active participation.
True openness in education requires:
• Funding public, open-source digital infrastructure, including community-managed servers, multilingual content repositories, and low-bandwidth tools that serve under-connected regions.
• Supporting culturally embedded content creation by local educators, using inclusive pedagogical frameworks that reflect linguistic and epistemic diversity.
• Prioritising learner-led initiatives, such as peer learning networks, open badges, collaborative curriculum design, and grassroots knowledge hubs.
• Embedding ethical frameworks in edtech design that centre equity, pluralism, and collective care rather than metrics and monetisation.
Openness must move beyond technical access or enrolment figures. If it is to be liberatory, it must be rooted in agency, context and shared authorship. Otherwise, we risk confusing digital scale for educational justice.