Background
The quest to attain the highest global education rate in the nearest future, continues to be the desire and objective of all concerned bodies and organizations in the world. The 2nd agenda of the just elapsed Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) and the 4th agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) both seeks to promote and achieve a universal primary education for all in the nearest future (UNSDG Knowledge, 2015 and UNOD, 2016). These goals notwithstanding, accessing higher education by all who require it in this dispensation has not been an easy task, seeing that those who desire these form of education have been on a geometric increase: For instance, the demand for higher education globally is predicted would have doubled by 2025, to 200 million number of persons seeking such education per year. This number would come mostly from emerging economies (NAFSA 2010).
The quest to provide adequately for the rising demand for education at all levels in the 21st century - researchers like (Wogu, 2016; Wogu, 2018; Wogu, 2019) believe - is responsible for jump-starting the great revolution in global online education which has hit the education industry like a tsunami (Brooks and Collins, 2012). The thought about the gains associated with the advent of online global education excites the ordinary man since this new trend is believed, would further liberate the ordinary man from poverty and increase the individual’s chances of getting better and new jobs and long over-due promotions from ones place of work. To this end, contemporary researchers tend to argue that of all other factors, education seems to be that one factor with the most potential to unlock billions of brains for solving the world’s biggest problems in the 21st Century (Friedman, 2013; Kolla and Ng, 2013; Scagnoli, 2014; Richter, 2014 and Siemen, 2014). The platform believed would be instrumental in delivering the mandate of making education available to all, is the platform of ‘Massive Open Online Course, also known as MOOC. Studies however reveal that this platform is currently undergoing further development at the instance of great institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University. Other companies like Udacity, Coursera, Wiz IQ, edX, UPEx, iversity, Stanford Online and Etcetera, are also actively engaged in the use of this MOOC platforms (Friedman, 2013).
As profound as the goal of making affordable /free education available to the less privilege and all desiring such education via the platform of MOOC is, there are an increasing number of researchers who believe that the move to make education affordable and available to all desiring it, is beginning to have an untold damage on the whole essence of the goal of education and on the original values of the institution on which the whole idea of teaching and learning was founded upon. This paper therefore critically investigates the roles which AI powered MOOCs have played in fostering the goals of education in the 21st century.