What if in the next five minutes you could register for a college-level class taught by a professor from Harvard, free of charge? This seemingly impossible opportunity is now possible with a revolutionary educational experience called MOOCs.

Young adults all over the world compete for jobs and opportunities. Over the past few decades, higher education has been identified as the primary pathway to success. As a result, even at WFS, students feel stressed and pressured when thinking about college. Simone Veale ’17 stated, “The pressure of getting into a good college is always in the back of my head. Junior year on its own is stressful, but with everyone reminding us that this is the year that really counts for college, it makes it much more stressful.” But with the daunting application process and crushing student loans, access to a quality college education seems ever more remote, and is becoming more and more difficult to obtain for students across the globe. MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, address this problem through an innovative and global approach.

Today, it is commonplace for colleges such as Stanford University or the University of Phoenix to offer online courses. Students register for a course from a colorful selection online, and follow the Skype-style lessons while submitting work over the internet. MOOCs take this idea and, as the name suggests, reproduce it on a massive scale. Instead of offering live online classes for  students, colleges hire professors to prerecord brief, structured and informative lessons. Once the lessons are recorded, they add assignments or quizzes, creating a whole college-level course. Then, colleges release the course onto websites such as coursera.com for anyone in the world to access at any time, entirely free of charge. So far, 35 million students have jumped on this opportunity. Classes available on coursera.com today include courses from prestigious colleges such as Harvard, MIT and Duke, plus dozens from other countries.

Due to the high expectations for these lessons and professors, the quality of instruction is even higher: in one class on Coursera, 63% of students at a prestigious university said the MOOC was better than the same class they were taking on campus. 36% found it comparable, and just 1% found it worse. Though the retention rate of classes is low (around 7-9% of students complete a course) – due to how simple it is to sign up for a course and then drop it – thousands of students make it to the end, with three quarters of students coming from outside the USA. The MOOCs’ open format transforms the world of globalized education, promising anyone who has internet the access to a world-class education.

For intellectually-motivated students all around the world, MOOCs are the perfect solution to partake in a top quality course at an unbeatable price. One inspiring example of this was a teenage MOOC student from far-off Mongolia, Battushig Myanganbayar. After officials noticed his perfect score in their sophomore-level MOOC class, MIT offered him admission and a scholarship.

However, for the large majority of young adults, priority lies in attending prestigious colleges not for the benefit of the education, but for the credential on the resumé. And therein lies the biggest difference between traditional higher level education and MOOCs: while the completion of a MOOC can provide a certificate, it cannot provide an official college degree, which is what employers are often interested in seeing. Sandrine Haab ’18 states, “when you start looking for a career, after all of that hard work online they might not want you because sadly, in this world, a lot of people look at the college you went to rather than your knowledge.” However, Ellen Johnson, IB Biology teacher, who teaches as well as participates in online classes, disagrees: “I don’t know if [the absence of degrees] is a fault; I’d like education to be about learning, not merely about earning a degree – however, I realize that this comes from the very privileged view of someone with a degree and with a job.” A very different venture in global education proposes to address this issue.

Minerva offers its students the world as their college campus. With locations across the globe, students travel from country to country each semester, while tuning in to classes given online. While allowing students from all around the world a chance to explore the cultures of different countries, it also provides that which MOOCs cannot: a degree to verify their education. “What’s great about Minerva is that it provides this global experience, but at the same time tries to keep the quality and feel of an independent high school,” states Johnson, who has talked with the Minerva director at a meeting about online education.

One WFS alumna, Fiona Iyer ’12, is currently studying at the Minerva campus in San Francisco, California, and is getting ready to move on to the one in Berlin. Iyer said, “my favorite part about Minerva is the incredibly diverse student body; my friends are from Brazil, Israel and Argentina. I wake up every morning to the sound of many different languages from all sorts of different places… there are always interesting foods in the dining halls, and you learn so many different cultural customs.” In addition to its global student body, Iyer mentioned a more open-ended style of education, “Our model is much more based on developing skills we can apply rather than memorizing content; our ‘lessons’ we find in the cities we inhabit.” This approach to learning, Iyer explained, combined with Minerva students’ frequent travel, results in a greater emphasis on independence and exploration. It is an inspiration “to truly live every day.”

These initiatives, though flawed in their own ways, are significant in their impact on the globalization of education. While Friends School students may worry, with reason, over their chances of getting into the college of their dreams, all over the world, students who are equally-aspiring and often over-performing, have much smaller chances. Through their open formats, these initiatives offer education globally, transcending country borders and rearranging the playing field for students in all corners of the world.