A Macro-Scale MOOC Analysis of the Socioeconomic Status of Learners and Their Learning Outcomes

Introduction

Digital education keeps growing and growing and it is deeply transforming some of the core practices across all teaching and learning levels (Bilyalova et al., 2020). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital education revolution (Khusanov et al., 2022), and some authors are suggesting the need to re-envision the role of schools and universities in the digital era (Colao et al., 2020). Even though we are slowly entering the post-COVID-19 era, we can also expect this kind of extreme disruptions to grow over the next years due to climate, socio-political, or health-related crises, to name a few (Ansu-Kyeremeh & Goosen, 2022; Siri et al., 2016). Therefore, digital education can only be expected to become even more prevalent over the following years. However, some studies have shown how COVID-19 digitalization has heavily affected students from the school to university level in developing countries in different ways (Lin & Yeh, 2022; M S & Siddiqui, 2022; Maity et al., 2021; Treceñe, 2022). Hence the need to make sure equitable educational opportunities are being provided across different collectives (Bihu, 2022; Iyer et al., 2022; Krishnaswami et al., 2022).

In that sense, one of the most disruptive examples of digital education during the last decade is Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) (Yuan & Powell, 2013). MOOCs have several key features, such as that they are massively taken by many students, they are available online through any kind of device, and open to be freely taken by anyone (Daniel, 2012). At least that was the initial vision, and the literature and public narrative initially offered a utopian vision that said that MOOCs could significantly transform education, even becoming a danger to traditional higher education (Vardi, 2012). However, the reality is that over the last decade, many MOOC providers have evolved to a more conservative position partnering with universities and seeking sustainable business models (Ruipérez-Valiente et al., 2019). One good example is the appearance of micro master degrees taken partially via MOOC providers that would provide a university title (Hernández & Amado-Salvatierra, 2017). Moreover, MOOCs have also been positively affected by COVID-19, with large enrolment growth during the pandemic (Impey & Formanek, 2021). In addition, many universities are re-using the acquired online instructional design and multimedia competencies as part of MOOC development, to offer Small Private Online Courses before and during the pandemic (Arima et al., 2021; Dong et al., 2021).

However, while MOOCs have truly offered many new educational opportunities at different scales, there have also been many challenges emerging, especially in the context of human development (Daniel, 2012). One of the key problems has been related to the large attrition rates in MOOCs (Ruipérez-Valiente et al., 2017). In addition, another one of the most known issues has been that the majority of learners taking MOOCs come from affluent countries and already have an education (Ruipérez-Valiente et al., 2019). The literature affirms that completion and attrition are heavily influenced by the socio-economic status of the learners, based on their country of origin (Kizilcec et al., 2017). Furthermore, technology access in the Global South might be a real barrier for MOOCs to have a strong impact on developing countries (Amaghouss & Zouine, 2022; Garcia & Revano, 2022; Lamsal, 2022; Patru & Venkataraman, 2016). Therefore, the majority of the literature has agreed that these challenges represent real barriers for MOOCs to improve human development (Castillo et al., 2015).

One prevalent issue raised by previous studies is that they have been mostly focused on data samples with limited generalizability caused by concentrating on single courses (Breslow et al., 2013) or several courses from a single provider (Chuang & Ho, 2016). In addition, the literature has usually centered on the predominant MOOC providers, like edX, Coursera, or FutureLearn. However, there is a much larger number of MOOC platforms that are providing courses to different audiences. The Class Central website lists at least 54 different MOOC providers in the world offering public courses (Shah et al., 2022), and these other platforms might have different trends than the main players. In summary, there have not been large-scale studies assessing a portfolio of MOOCs in terms of the socioeconomic status, in order to find which trends are universal and which of them are context-dependent, and these studies are the ones that hold the most potential (Reich, 2015).