MOOCs and Global Education

Approximately 80% of the world’s population is unable to access educational content published in English (Beaven, Comas-Quinn, de los Arcos, & Hauck, 2013). Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have the potential to provide educational opportunities across geographic, linguistic and cultural boundaries that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. The core content of a MOOC is really no different than the core content of any online course; it is designed and taught in one language, typically by designers from one culture. It is the massiveness and openness that changes an online course into a system in which information is re-transmitted, shared, and adapted to participant needs. Solitary participants from remote areas have the opportunity to interact with other experts and learners in specialized areas through the MOOC environment. The result is a growing democratization of access to information and a diminishing language barrier.

One of the adaptations needed when participation in a MOOC grows and crosses international lines is the need for translation into other languages. Simon Thrun and Peter Norvig of Stanford taught one of the earliest MOOCs, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Rodriguez, 2012). It was offered free to anyone in the world, and attracted 160,000 enrollees. Of those, 20,000 from 190 different countries completed the course. With the help of more than 2,000 volunteers, the course was translated into 44 different languages (Murray, 2012). In an unplanned, grassroots movement, many participants connected on social media as well, in languages other than English, making the MOOC both more accessible and more relevant to their needs (Murray, 2012).

Coursera provides an ongoing example of an approach to overcoming geographinc, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Coursera is a non-profit organization started out of Stanford University in 2012 that partners with universities around the world in order to provide free, high-quality MOOCs that are open to anyone in the world. That mission requires dealing with the issue of language. The mission of the Coursera project is “to connect the world to a great education. To do so, we have to overcome language barriers, which can be very real obstacles for our students who come from all over the world.” (Coursera, 2013). After one year of providing courses in English, Coursera formed the Global Translations Partners Program in order to begin the process of translating courses into Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian, with more languages to follow. Reaching 5.2 million users after only 18 months of existence, this project is worth noting because of its scale and because it is taking a lead role in modeling global access to the highest quality learning.

MOOCs and translation projects like the ones cited here have shown the potential to build language bridges across spans that would otherwise have seemed impassable. The nature of MOOCs leads to collaborative solving of the inherent language issues of the Internet.

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