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DOI: 10.4324/97810030 09757-12
MOOCs were introduced with various promises: democratizing access to
education, solving long-lasting social problems of access to education for
social groups traditionally excluded from it, and providing millions of work-
ers around the world with convenient reskilling and upskilling opportuni-
ties. These promises sounded irresistible, and the media hype surrounding
them was indeed convincing. In 2012, MOOCs were named the year’s most
important discovery, and for a certain period, it seemed probable that they
would soon be competing with universities and higher education systems.
However, as we know from this book (and from many other academic pub-
lications which have taken the MOOC phenomenon seriously), such prom-
ises proved unfounded. A growing body of empirical research showed that
the MOOCs were not targeting exactly the typical persons in need; rather,
they attracted highly-educated, male, white learners living in wealthy coun-
tries or neighborhoods. Moreover, these were also the learners who could
perform better and, consequently, benet the most from this form of cheap
lifelong learning. Lastly, the MOOCs did not replace universities at all: uni-
versities are still secure and rather englobed MOOCs for various purposes.
The attractive elite universities leveraged MOOCs to enhance their global
reputations; some others outsourced continuing vocational training to the
MOOCs; while others (mainly in Europe) use MOOCs for experimenting
with learning models.
So, one may ask, why a book on MOOCs, and what can their story still
tell us in 2020s?
As the resurgence of MOOCs in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic
showed, MOOCs were only the most visible part of a broader and powerful
trend which concerned the digitalization of many aspects of people’s lives.
The MOOCs were one of the many expressions of a techno-solutionist ap-
proach which claimed that it could solve complex social problems with the
use of technology. The techno-solutionist narrative proved strongly resilient
and indeed reappeared in spring 2020 with the new wave of interest in on-
line learning in general (and in MOOCs in particular) that arose during the
COVID-19 p andemic.
9 Conclusions
208 Conclusions
Therefore, this book has taken up the challenge of providing an encom-
passing and multilevel analysis that highlights the social complexity of the
MOOC phenomenon, its consequences, and the challenges that it poses for
a social scholarship. The book has furnished new insights into the phenom-
enon of MOOCs by means of a complementary mixed-method research de-
sign that combines quantitative and qualitative data from various sources
and adopts a comparative approach that identies the different patterns of
MOOC diffusion and their social implications in the USA and Europe.
Finally, this ambitious agenda has been pursued along three main lines of
inquiry. Part 1 of the book started the investigation of the MOOC phenom-
enon from the macro-level perspective. It did so by analyzing the institu-
tional impact of MOOCs on the ecology of higher education systems in the
USA and Europe. This part investigated who were the key actors involved
in the production and supply of MOOCs on the two sides of the Atlantic,
and it explored the extent to which the spread of MOOCs may have changed
the dynamics among institutions in the same organizational eld of higher
education.
Part 2 of the book shifted the analysis to the micro level. It concentrated
on the attitudes and behaviours that registered users of MOOCs show when
they enroll for and study on a MOOC (the upstream side of the MOOC ex-
perience). This part sought to understand whether the dynamics responsible
for the unequal opportunities to access education and training observed for
formal education may be reproduced in the context of MOOCs. Broadly
speaking, the second part of the book tried to answer the following ques-
tions: do MOOCs contribute to reducing inequalities of educational oppor-
tunity? Who are MOOC learners and what socio-economic characteristics
are associated with success in (or drop out from) MOOCs?
The third part of the book maintained the focus on the micro level by
investigating what happens “downstream” from the MOOC experience, i.e.
what learners do once the MOOC is over (whether they have completed the
course or only studied some modules). This third section thus tried to answer
the following questions: What are the returns to MOOCs in terms of skills
formation and occupational outcomes? What uses are made of MOOCs by
learners? And what type of benets may stem from a MOOC?
The following sections discuss the main results emerging from each part
of the book and provide some nal considerations.
9.1 A European way to MOOCs?
The MOOCs phenomenon, as we know it today, is undoubtedly a product
of the US higher education system, of its internal dynamics, and of its close
relationship with the technological sector. The mainstream MOOCs origi-
nated from bottom-up initiatives led by charismatic computer science pro-
fessors whose faith in the salvationary potential of technology paired well
with the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. These experiments were
Conclusions 209
then englobed in more structured university-led endeavors. The ourishing
of the MOOCs was at the same time the consequence and the accelerator of
two trends traversing the US HE system: on the one hand, the growing le-
gitimacy acquired by computer science and the internet ideology in society;
on the other, the competition among elite universities for the redenition of
power roles at the top of the HE hierarchy (Gebre-Medhin, 2018).
The MOOC-mania soon spread worldwide, and in Europe, after 2013 sev-
eral MOOC initiatives were launched by European HE institutions. How-
ever, since MOOCs were not created in a vacuum, the institutional context
mattered and path dependence dynamics played a crucial role in shaping the
pattern by which MOOCs spread in Europe.
Indeed, compared to the USA, the spread of MOOCs in Europe exhibits
unique features that can be summarized in three key aspects: (i) the type of
actors involved; (ii) the institutional logic driving European initiatives; and
(iii) the structure of supply of MOOCs.
The US and Europe are characterized by profound differences in the
structure of their HE systems; dissimilarities that are mirrored in how
MOOCs spread in the two areas. The rst key difference between Europe
and the USA is that a European common HE system does not exist. Despite
efforts to harmonize the various national systems through the Bologna Pro-
cess, each Member State still maintains its own authority over education,
including the higher education system. A second important difference is the
structure of the HE system. The US HE system is a multi-tier structure,
highly stratied and diversied, with a handful of 4-year selective elite lib-
eral arts colleges and research universities that constitute the top tier (in-
volving only a tiny minority of all US students), and a large base of broad
access schools that admit the majority of applicants and range from 4- to
2-year programmes at public or private organizations. Instead, most Euro-
pean countries have a larger public component, and their HE systems are
less diversied and stratied than those in the USA.
As regards the actors involved in the MOOC development, European
MOOC experiences have been supported since the beginning by an active
and participatory role of governmental initiatives led by the European Com-
mission at the super-national level and by national Ministries at the state
level. In this context, regional and national policies have been considered
key enablers in supporting the growth of MOOCs. They have funded spe-
cic programmes for the spread of MOOCs and even directly funded public
platforms for the provision of MOOCs. The public nature of these initiatives
has meant that the development of MOOCs in Europe has been generally
(though not exclusively) led by public actors and is less oriented by market
principles compared to the leading private companies providing MOOCs
in the USA (such as Coursera and Udacity). However, this greater reliance
on public actors and in particular on European funds has in the long run
represented a weakness, since some pan-European projects – including the
MOOC Scoreboard, the only attempt to provide regular monitoring of and
210 Conclusions
reliable statistics on European initiatives – have been terminated or struggle
to secure regular funding.
This leads to the second point: the “institutional logics” that characterize
MOOC experiences on the two sides of the Atlantic. From the outset, the
spread of MOOCs in the USA has exhibited features typically pertaining
to the “economic paradigm”, with major MOOC platforms following (or
drifting towards) for-prot principles and reducing free access. Recently,
mainstream MOOCs have indeed lost the second O of their acronym, the
one that stands for “open” in terms of both accessibility and content. With
the signicant exception of Future Learn, the UK-based platform which
ranks among the top 3 MOOC providers globally and follows typical market
principles, all other European initiatives show greater concern for preserv-
ing the original openness and accessibility features inherited from the Open
Education movement. Therefore, while most of the leading platforms have
shifted toward professional courses targeted on upskilling and reskilling the
labour force, there are several European initiatives that tend to oppose the
neoliberal and techno-solutionist view of MOOCs in favor of learning ex-
perimentation, enlarging the audience of potential learners, and preserving
accessibility and openness. Another key point in this regard is the attention
paid to the cultural and linguistic diversity of the European context. Al-
though the majority of the courses provided by European institutions are in
English so that they can reach a wide audience, several experiences advocate
linguistic and cultural diversity, either directly (e.g. FUN, EMMA) or indi-
rectly (e.g. Spanish HE institutions on MiriadaX).
The third element of diversity concerns the structure of the supply. As
seen in Chapter 2, despite a steady growth of courses offered and a sub-
stantial increase of learners during the COVID-19 pandemic, the overall
number of MOOC providers has remained quite stable since 2013, leading
to an increasing concentration of supply in the hands of a restricted group
of platforms. The recent decision to sell MiriadaX, a large Spanish platform
targeting an Ibero-American audience, besides indicating disinvestment
by European actors in the MOOC market, may also lead to a monopoliza-
tion of the MOOC market by the big three providers (Coursera, edX, Fu-
tureLearn) (Shah, 2020). With the exception of Future Learn, which can
be likened to the North-American model, the emerging pattern for Europe
is the diffusion of MOOC initiatives among many institutions and many
MOOC providers. Moreover, European experiences highlight a preference
of HE institutions for running MOOCs on their own platforms, as opposed
to out-sourcing the provision of MOOCs to external platforms, as in the
case of Coursera or edX. This results in a plurality of solutions in the pro-
vision of MOOCs whereby a couple of pan-European MOOC aggregators
(OpenupEd, MOOC Consortium) are anked by a plurality of country-level
initiatives following different approaches according to different degrees
of involvement of governmental institutions. The positive side of this ar-
rangement for the supply of MOOCs is a much greater diversity of courses
Conclusions 211
available to learners in terms of language, subjects, pedagogical approaches,
and business models. The shortcoming may be a certain degree of confusion
and difculty of users in orienting oneself among such a scattered supply
sometimes fragmented into small and loosely coordinated initiatives.
Therefore, whilst making forecasts in regard to MOOCs is risky, the near
future seems to be characterized by the coexistence of many MOOCs. On the
one hand, mainstream commercial platforms such as Coursera, edX, and
Future Learn will continue to attract the majority of learners and courses
worldwide, leading to a growing concentration of supply targeted especially
on professionals and their need for continuous vocational development. On
the other hand, a lively ecosystem of less market-oriented platforms, either
public or mixed, consisting of single universities or consortia of universi-
ties and governmental institutions, will continue to focus on learning ex-
perimentation and on preserving the original values of the Open Education
Movement. Against this background, universities are still safe. In both the
EU and the USA, the integration of MOOCs into the HE system did not
happen, and even the recent push towards micro-credentials does not seem
to have interfered with the sector of formal education. The two markets do
not overlap and instead, remain complementary or even increase the num-
ber of students on campus courses (Galil, 2018; Jacqmin, 2018).
9.2 For many…but not for all
The second part of the book addressed the “upstream side” of the MOOC
experience: by which is meant the motivations that induce a person to surf
the web and enrol on a MOOC, and the learning path that individuals
with different socio-economic characteristics experience (from intention,
through engagement in, to completion – or not – of MOOCs).
MOOCs were initially marketed as a technology-driven solution to the
longstanding problems of inequalities of access to education. Indeed, the
lower costs and minor barriers to access compared to those of formal educa-
tion should have been key enabling factors that – in principle – incentivized
enrolment, persistence, and completion by less advantaged groups. Even
recently, when expectations in this regard have diminished, during the
Covid-19 pandemic MOOCs have still been promoted as affordable substi-
tutes for the lack of in-presence teaching. However, the growing body of
studies on patterns of access to MOOCs has revealed that the very same
patterns and mechanisms identied by the literature on inequalities of op-
portunities in access to higher education are replicated in MOOCs. Indi-
viduals with weaker socio-economic backgrounds – who were originally
thought to be the target population – access these resources less than their
advantaged peers; and when they do so, they are less likely to complete the
courses with a certicate (whose labour-market value remains uncertain).
Therefore, these studies provide support for downsizing expectations about
MOOCs from their supposed democratizing power to a much lower-prole
212 Conclusions
focus on lifelong learning and training. What literature left unexplored (or
underexplored) is that some particular categories, such as individuals who
are unemployed or do not have support for training, may nonetheless gain
some benets from the availability of MOOCs. Moreover, there is still scant
qualitative research on the individual mechanisms and meanings behind the
actual behaviours and strategies of learners, so that a substantial part of the
MOOC experience remains unexplored.
Overall, the ndings of the book are consistent with the patterns isolated
by the previous empirical literature. But they also contribute to blurring the
boundaries of previously strictly dened patterns of motivations and com-
pletion. In particular, the ndings reveal an active role of some particular
groups of learners in shaping their own strategies for MOOCs.
As regards motivations, multiple reasons to do with work, education, and
personal life coexist in the choice of enrolling on a MOOC. This plurality of
strategies emerges clearly from the qualitative ndings which identied four
main groups of learners:
a employed individuals who used MOOCs to address contingent work-
related needs, albeit with different degrees of pressure according to the
level of competition that characterized their labour market (higher in
the USA and in the tech sector, lower in the European countries);
b employed or unemployed individuals who used MOOCs (also in combi-
nation with other resources) to make a career change in order to obtain
more rewarding opportunities or to exit vicious cycles of low pay and
low-quality work;
c employed individuals who mixed professional and personal motivations
to enrol on MOOCs, did not have an impelling career or job- related
motivations but nonetheless kept themselves trained and updated in
multiple elds;
d students who used MOOCs as additional and cheap tutoring resources
while studying, so that they could deal with difcult exams, or as pre-
views of future academic courses.
The quantitative analyses stressed the prevalence of an instrumental
and compensatory role attributed to MOOCs by learners who perceived
themselves to be weak in the labour market. With the overall objective of
strengthening their prospective labour market chances, learners who were
unemployed or lacked work experience (like students) tended to invest in a
wide array of skills, including language skills, that may not have the same
perceived labour-market potential as, e.g. a statistics course, but are trans-
versal competences functional to numerous industries. This instrumental
rationality oriented to increasing the level and quality of skills and improv-
ing future career prospects is also observed among employed learners. How-
ever, for them, the horizon of motivations seems to be mainly centered on
the relevance of the skills to contingent needs and current job positions.
Conclusions 213
As regards patterns of engagement, completion, and dropping out, the
quantitative analyses conrmed that learners with different socio-economic
characteristics may attribute different uses to the courses considered. But
they also showed that individuals with a better socio-economic status (de-
rived from the higher cultural and cognitive skills associated with their lev-
els of education) are more likely to stay engaged and complete the course
with a certicate.
Indeed, the greater likelihood of completion and engagement for learners
with high educational qualications (at the graduate level such as a Master’s
or PhD) in the Statistics course largely conrms the relative advantage of
learners with a higher socio-economic status. They are likely to start with
more developed specic skills on the subject and also have better soft skills
from their education that make it easier for them to study the topic. More-
over, their higher cultural and cognitive skills represent an advantage also
with respect to virtual interaction during the course: they are more condent
and more prone to interact in the online discussion forums, ultimately fur-
ther advantaging themselves in the learning process through a typical ‘Mat-
thew effect’ (Merton, 1968). However, an unexpected nding is the greater
chances of course completion by unemployed learners, which further sup-
ports the idea of a strategic and instrumental role attributed to MOOCs by
some groups of learners. In fact, unemployed individuals, in a disadvan-
taged labour-market situation, may rationally decide to complete the course
and attain a certicate in order to improve their employment opportunities,
based on the expectation that prospective employers may appreciate this as
a signal of their competences and willingness to reskill (or upskill). To use
the terminology of Max Weber’s theory of social action (Weber, [1922] 1978),
unemployed learners pursue a ‘goal rational’ type of social action in which
the learner is able to understand the means necessary to achieve the goal, is
aware of the consequences (and risks), and acts accordingly. This strategic
approach seems not to be applied to all kinds of courses, but apparently
only to those with greater importance or applicability in the labour market
such as Statistical Learning.
Second, since their inception, the high dropout rates of MOOCs have been
a critical issue. The qualitative analysis – though not strictly focused on
dropouts alone – provided a more composite account of this critical issue.
The rst important result is that all the interviewees were at the same time
completers of some courses and dropouts from others. Therefore, rather
than being interpreted with the classic distinction between completers and
dropouts, the behaviour of MOOC learners exhibits a dichotomy between
an active or passive attitude towards the course. Consistently with previous
ndings, learners tended to complete the courses that might have direct ap-
plicability in their career, or for which they wanted to exhibit a certicate
of completion (e.g. to be put on social media). But also their decision not to
complete was part of a strategy in which they actively selected the parts of
the course that might be useful for their career (professional or educational)
214 Conclusions
while discarding those modules that they considered not useful or not of
good quality. The stories told by the learners interviewed depicted a context
in which they actively made conscious choices and took deliberate action,
also in the awareness of an experimental dimension of MOOCs which al-
lows learners to try and test in a low-risk environment. The outcome of the
decision to stop studying the course materials, coded in the quantitative
data univocally as “dropping out”, actually hid multiple meanings and rea-
sons. It may be the result of an active process of selection by the learner
(“cherry-picking strategy”), or it may be the consequence of real difculties
in understanding the course content due to a lack of cognitive skills, or dif-
culties in organizing work and study time due to a lack of soft and organi-
zational skills (“outright dropping out”).
All these ndings highlight a crucial issue that characterizes both the up-
stream and downstream part of the MOOC experience: the critical impor-
tance of individuals’ own resources. Indeed, the decision-making process
that leads to enrolment on a MOOC reveals that when learners subscribe
for a MOOC, they have already evaluated their situation, reected on their
weaknesses and gaps – both professional and educational – identied what
may be a possible solution (e.g. the MOOC), and decided how and where to
achieve that solution. Therefore, they have clear strategies in mind, strat-
egies shaped by their own perceptions and experience of the structure of
incentives and constraints of the labour market, but also formulated on the
basis of their own endowment of cognitive, meta-cognitive, and soft skills.
Hence, the “active pattern” is not within everyone’s reach: it requires a set
of good cognitive skills with which to understand the content of the courses,
but also the ability to identify one’s needs, the capacity to search for and se-
lect the right resources in a multitude of online courses, good internet skills,
and, last but not least, a good stock of soft skills which enable the learner to
organize the study materials in an efcient manner. However, these skills do
not appear by chance; rather, they are closely correlated with previous edu-
cational experiences and are further expanded by professional experience,
particularly in highly-qualied jobs (Balcar, 2014).
Therefore, the active strategy towards MOOCs seems well suited to the
upper segment of smart and dedicated students or professionals, who start
from a high level of cognitive and soft skills which enable them to devise
a consistent MOOC-attendance strategy in line with their goals and their
means, ultimately enabling them not to get lost along the way.
9.3 Don’t think it is a silver bullet…
The third part of the book focused on the ‘downstream side’ of MOOCs
in order to investigate whether learners ultimately benet from having en-
rolled on a MOOC and what types of returns are most common. Advocates
of MOOCs have automatically assumed positive effects on the occupational
prospects of workers. They have stressed the ease of access, the exibility,
Conclusions 215
and the limited cost of such resources. However, empirical research has
not yet fully grasped the extent to which learners perceive attendance on
a MOOC as benecial, how the potential benets in terms of professional
and career opportunities may vary among learners, and through what
mechanisms such a positive effect may unfold. By bridging the disciplinary
constraints that have hitherto prevented a compelling understanding of the
MOOC phenomenon, the ndings of this part of the book highlighted that
labour-market returns to MOOCs can be fruitfully interpreted in the frame-
work of the same mechanisms by which education and training are rewarded
on the labour market. Indeed, the dynamics observed with respect to the re-
turns to formal education and lifelong learning tend to be replicated in the
context of MOOCs. Moreover, as in the case of education and training, the
returns to MOOCs cannot be analyzed without considering the institutional
context of the labour-market regulation, the education and training regime,
and the occupational structure of the countries where learners live.
With this general framework in mind, the analysis of the qualitative mate-
rial gathered from MOOC students in the USA and Europe has highlighted
several types of returns, as well as diverse strategies that learners associate
with MOOCs.
On the positive side, it is true that attending a MOOC contributes to the
acquisition of new skills, both ones specic to the job and transversal soft
skills. Therefore, learners often target MOOCs to improve or diversify
their skill sets, consistently with the hypothesis of the human capital the-
ory (Becker, 1964) by which the additional education and training acquired
through MOOCs is rewarded in the labour market insofar as it enhances the
productive skills of the worker. Second, MOOCs may also generate positive
returns in terms of career prospects, since learners may use these courses to
distinguish themselves from other competitors, signaling their goodwill and
motivation, as well as their proactivity and ability to learn, consistently with
the signaling and screening theory (Arrow, 1973; Spence, 1973). Third, be-
sides the economic and professional returns that may derive from MOOCs,
some interviewees also reported an exploratory and experimental dimension
of MOOCs. In this regard, MOOCs represented an opportunity for learners
to experiment in a low-risk environment, test their abilities and challenge
themselves, or open their minds with new knowledge opportunities, without
fearing instructor’s blame, social pressure from peers or ones based on gen-
der stereotypes. For some interviewees, MOOCs represented a form of es-
cape from routine jobs or social and spatial isolation, helped learners to cope
with transition periods which required moving to a new country or making
new family arrangements, and in some cases even contributed to expanding
social capital through the arrangement of local study groups.
However, the negative side is that these returns are not within everyone’s
reach. Firstly, substantial self-selection issues emerge with respect to who
can benet from the skills acquisition. As seen above, those learners who are
able to benet from the skills acquired in MOOCs are again individuals who
216 Conclusions
already have a high level of education, good individual resources in terms of
motivation, organizational resources, and a learning-oriented and proactive
attitude, which enable them to identify strengths and weaknesses and build a
consistent training path. Moreover, the knowledge acquired through MOOCs
is only complementary to, and never substitutive for, the formal (and gener-
ally higher) education that interviewees had already acquired in the past.
Therefore, in the future, the spread of MOOCs may give rise to new ar-
eas of potential discrimination. Besides the self-selection issues mentioned
above, the strategic use of MOOCs by learners to complement and update
their skill sets may prove ambivalent for learners themselves. Indeed, whilst
it is true that MOOCs signal the goodwill and proactivity of the worker,
who can acquire additional skills at no or low cost, their spread seems to
contribute further to a growing trend of individualization of the responsi-
bility for training. Indeed, although MOOCs do not entail high monetary
costs of entry, their popularity may promote and legitimize a shift of re-
sponsibility for (and burden of) training from the employer to the employ-
ees, who train themselves at their own expense and outside working hours.
The consequences for the work-life balance of this use of MOOCs may be
an additional cost for and discrimination against female workers, who often
experience the double burden of family and work duties. Such factors may
also shape MOOCs as high-risk investments for learners who do not have a
good endowment of organizational and motivational resources.
Lastly, the ambiguous nature of MOOCs between formal and informal,
and their lack of the legitimacy of recognized accredited institutions, explic-
itly qual ify them as an inferior ty pe of lifelong lear ning, infer ior to traditional
education, and even inferior to accredited training courses. The decision
to avoid mentioning the origin of the skills acquired for fear of devaluing
or discrediting the learners’ commitment indirectly shows the persistence
of social closure mechanisms (Collins, 1979). Despite initial claims that
MOOC certicates equalize access to education, the perceptions of learners
instead conrm that the MOOC phenomenon (re)establishes a hierarchy of
prestige of educational qualications consistent with mechanisms of social
closure. Moreover, the status and attractive power of a handful of globally
recognized elite universities are further reinforced by the MOOC phenom-
enon, pointing to the reproduction – rather than bypassing – of the typical
social closure mechanisms observed for formal educational credentials.
Finally, the comparative analysis highlighted that the mechanism of re-
ward works differently in the two labour markets considered. In the USA
learners tend to report more frequently the importance of MOOCs for the
acquisition of productive skills and human capital. In fact – given the oc-
cupational structure that characterizes the USA, the relatively low level of
regulation of access to professions, and the low level of employment protec-
tion legislation (compared to most European countries) – it is reasonable to
expect that MOOCs are more rewarded in the US labour market through
Conclusions 217
human capital and signaling mechanisms, while the level of actual skills
tested on the job by-passes formal requirements of educational credentials,
reducing the impact of social closure mechanisms. Indeed, the interviews
depicted a situation in which learners were under pressure to invest in
their human capital throughout their life courses in order to remain com-
petitive in the labour market, suggesting that nobody “feels safe” in such
a labour market. In a highly competitive, but also mobile, labour market
rewarding actual competences on the job – particularly in the tech sector –
medium-to-high qualied employees perceive the need to keep themselves
updated, responsive, and “viable” in the labour market in order to deal with
any possible future risk, but also to grasp future opportunities.
The prevalence of human capital mechanisms of reward also emerges
from the importance given to what the employee can concretely do dur-
ing job interviews or interactions at work. This appears particularly true
in the tech sector, where learners – though an upward selected segment of
them – seem indeed able to accumulate new skills through MOOCs. These
skills contribute to increasing their productivity – as assumed by the human
capital theory – and ultimately concur in preserving learners’ comparative
advantage in a highly attractive as well as rapidly evolving sector. Moreover,
the importance attributed to personal portfolios by learners in the tech sec-
tor is indicative of a lower pressure for social closure mechanisms in which
actual skills may bypass formal requirements of educational credentials.
The ndings for European learners instead depict a situation in which the
prevalent reward mechanisms of MOOCs are those of social closure and
signaling, consistently with the overall institutional framework. Europe,
despite profound country-level differences, when compared to the USA, is
characterized by regulated and protected labour markets as well as highly
standardized and regulated higher education systems (e.g. through the Eu-
ropean Higher Education Area and the legal value of university degrees).
Consistently, also for the European learners interviewed, MOOCs were at-
tractive for career, job, or educational purposes, but the choices reported
were more varied. European interviewees stressed the secondary role and
lower status of MOOCs with respect to formal education and other forms of
training, thereby conrming the persistence of social closure mechanisms
based on the requirement of accredited licenses and qualications. These
factors also contributed to a lower incidence of mechanisms associated with
the human capital hypothesis (at least compared to what was observed for
the USA), while signaling strategies pursued by learners tend to prevail.
Indeed, in countries characterized by general education (like Spain, where
many interviewees lived), job-specic skills tend to be acquired through on-
the-job training and experience, and employers tend to rely on extra signs
of productivity and employability of candidates beyond education. Not sur-
prisingly, therefore, European learners prevalently tend to use MOOCs to
signal their pro-activity, motivation, and ability to train themselves, thereby
sending an indirect message to employers and distinguishing themselves
218 Conclusions
from other competitors in the jobs queue, according to the ‘education as a
positional good’ mechanism. However, the lack of accreditation of MOOCs
as proper educational credits weakens their potential to be recognized as
educational credentials, and it instead reinforces mechanisms of social clo-
sure based on the requirement of accredited licenses and qualications.
9.4 Policy implications
Ultimately, MOOCs seem to reproduce the same patterns of inequality of
educational opportunities as already analyzed for formal education as well
as for adult and lifelong learning (Bernardi & Ballarino, 2016; Blossfeld
et al., 2014; Shavit et al., 2007; Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993). Notwithstanding
the slogans of mainstream MOOC providers, the majority of MOOCs are
not able to reach the segment of middle- to low-educated workers, marginal
workers, and not all unemployed individuals. However, this does not mean
that MOOCs should be discarded, since some groups (corresponding to mil-
lions of people in absolute terms) can concretely take advantage of MOOCs.
As this book demonstrates, an upward selected segment of the population
can indeed succeed in, and gain benets from, MOOCs: highly-qualied
professionals, not only in the tech sector but also teachers and employees in
the public sector, as well as smart and proactive students. For these learn-
ers, MOOCs are an easy-to-reach, low-cost, low-risk, as well as effective
resources that help them satisfy contingent needs or support them in tran-
sition periods. MOOCs are attractive to various types of learners because
they prove to be a useful, practical, and convenient solution for many of
them … although not for all.
Therefore, putt ing aside the hyp erbolic clai ms of easy and technological-based
solutions to the problems of access to education and training, the time is ripe
for moving the conversation on MOOCs to a more pragmatic level; a prag-
matic level which comprises the overall potentials and shortcomings of a com-
plex phenomenon which, like it or not, is here to stay as the recent resurgence
of MOOCs during the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated. This does not
mean lowering the level of attention of a “critical platform gaze” (Decuypere
et al., 2021); rather, it means complexifying the discussion also by extending
consideration of the phenomenon to the entire articulated and dynamic world
of MOOCs, beyond mainstream platforms alone.
From a public policy standpoint, this book suggests that investing in
MOOCs alone and outsourcing this responsibility to private for-prot plat-
forms risks being ineffective for disadvantaged individuals, whilst further
widening the gap between highly-educated, highly-qualied individuals,
well-endowed with their own soft skills, on the one hand, and the lower
and marginal segment of both workers and students on the other. But this
is not a trait of MOOCs alone: the same issue concerns public policies that
simply incentivize a generic increase in the supply of lifelong learning and
education. Multiplying a generic offer or incentivizing access to it may be
Conclusions 219
a common strategy, easy and convenient for short-term political purposes,
but it proves ineffective if the real goal is to reach the segments of the popu-
lation that are most in need.
Moreover, even though upward positively selected groups can benet
from MOOCs, the spread of such courses raises another crucial, broader
challenge: a shift of responsibility to the individual. Indeed, relying more
and more on tools like MOOCs for the re- and up-skilling of workers is
an additional step in the direction of moving the burden of training from
employers or other collective actors (e.g. trade unions or professional associ-
ations) to individuals alone. This trend of slowly replacing collective respon-
sibilities with individuals’ responsibility for their own development has been
ongoing since the early 2000s, as evidenced by the terminological shift from
“education and training” to (lifelong) “learning”. But this trend is growing
further in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and its stress
on the upskilling of the labour force. Not only the spread of MOOCs but
also the public and private support given to MOOCs for lifelong learning is
indicative of a growing process of individualization of risks and responsi-
bilities which sees individuals as increasingly responsible (if not obligated)
to provide for their own accumulation of knowledge and competences along
the life course (Daniele, 2017; Lodigiani, 2020; Milana, 2012).
Last but not least, this book has (hopefully) provided a comprehensive
analysis of the MOOC phenomenon in the USA and in Europe. But it has
left unexplored some other aspects that can further extend the understand-
ing of this phenomenon.
First, the composition of the samples, both quantitative and qualitative,
was skewed towards high-prole learners. As we know from the literature,
highly-educated and highly-qualied learners are numerically more pres-
ent among MOOC registered users. Moreover, high-performing learners
tend to be more willing to participate in surveys or to tell their stories
in follow-up steps of the research. This represents a challenging avenue
of research for the future: despite a series of research projects that have
focused on particularly disadvantaged groups (e.g. refugees), the niche of
low- to medium-educated individuals in the labour force remains largely
unexplored. The analyses presented in this book were not fully able to
grasp the standpoint of medium-to-low educated learners, marginal
workers, and other socially-disadvantaged groups. Nonetheless, research
that focuses on this segment of learners can provide important insights
and practical policy advice on where MOOCs may still exhibit substantial
improvement.
Second, the attitudes and predispositions of employers towards MOOCs
are still under-investigated but promising areas of inquiry. Accordingly,
investigating the degree of support of employers to MOOCs but also the
actual practices enacted during the recruitment and promotion of workers
may contribute signicantly to understanding and forecasting the next evo-
lution of MOOCs.
220 Conclusions
Finally, this book has explored the phenomenon of MOOCs in only one
section of the Western world, the USA and Europe. However, MOOCs are
emerging as a dynamic reality in many countries worldwide, in particular in
the Global South and Asia. Not only do countries like India, China, Thai-
land, and Vietnam record remarkable growth gures, but also part of this
growth relies on alternative approaches and models of MOOCs which are
worth investigating (Bonk et al., 2015; King et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019;
Zheng et al., 2018).
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