All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
In spring 1961, the American inventor Buckminster Fuller told a group of Southern Illinois University administrators that a new campus they were planning would soon be obsolete. He informed them that classroom learning was finished. Instead, students would gain knowledge through "an intercontinentally networked documentaries call-up system, operative over any home two-way TV set". All the world's great ideas would become freely accessible to anyone anywhere, instantaneously elucidated by the world's foremost educators. And he predicted that forward-thinking universities stood to benefit because educational automation was "the upcoming major world industry".
Fast forward half a century and, although his talk of two-way TV has been almost forgotten, his educational vision has an uncanny resemblance to massive open online courses (MOOCs). More than 500 schools worldwide - from Harvard and MIT to Southern Illinois University - have provided content to the non-profit edX consortium or the edutech company Coursera. A third MOOC provider, Udacity, has recently become a "unicorn", attaining a $1 billion (£700m) valuation from investors.
All of this has happened in just a few years. In autumn 2011, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun offered free online enrolment in his artificial-intelligence class, attracting 160,000 students from 190 countries. The following spring, MIT professor Anant Agarwal made a similar offer for his introductory electrical-engineering course, drawing an online class of 155,000. On the strength of these numbers, Agarwal launched edX and Thrun founded Udacity, while two of Thrun's Stanford colleagues started Coursera. Despite differences in their business model, all three shared an almost messianic idealism - the conviction that university-level education could become universal - and enlisted the best educators. In a 2013 TED Talk about edX, Agarwal captured the ethos in a single slogan: "Everything has to change."
By some measures, everything has changed as a result of MOOCs. Growth has been phenomenal. According to online course operator Class Central, the number of people who signed up for at least one MOOC surpassed 35 million in 2015, more than double the number just one year earlier, and the number of courses surged to approximately 4,200, nearly twice the number in 2014. But these figures conceal an opposing trend. Faced with class completion rates of as little as five per cent and financial pressure from funders, MOOC providers have narrowed their ideals.
The emphasis is increasingly on practical coursework and on charging pupils for certificates of completion. Coursera CEO Richard C Levin, formerly president of Yale, recently told The Chronicle of Higher Education that his company's "product-market fit" lies in development. Thrun, who now offers a money-back guarantee that Udacity students will find employment, recently told WIRED, "The ultimate objective of education is to find people a job."
There's nothing dishonourable about making job training more accessible, but the rapid retreat of MOOCs into vocational banality represents a squandered opportunity. The potential can be appreciated by looking back to the vision Fuller had for Southern Illinois University. For him, the potential of automation was to nurture universal curiosity, preparing the next generation to care for the planet they were inheriting. The goal was generalism, to interest people in everything, so that they could grapple with complexly interconnected global problems.
As the world's problems become more complicated, and the future more precarious, Fuller's impetus is increasingly apposite. And the technology underlying MOOCs - as well as their reach - provides a solid platform for broadening people's interests. MOOCs need to be linked across disciplines, with recommendation engines like those employed by Netflix and YouTube to entice students to compulsively take up new interests. Completion rates need to be de-emphasised in favour of curiosity quotients.
Vocational training is just one thin layer of education. For edutech to be worthy of its name - and for everything to truly change - MOOC platforms need to make every mind as expansive as the world wide web.
Jonathon Keats is the author of You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future (Oxford University Press)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
