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Access to free courses has allowed students to obtain a level of education that many only could dream of in the past.  This has changed the face of education.  In The New York Times article Instruction for Masses Knocked Down Campus Walls, author Tamar Lewin stated, “in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree.”

Although MOOCs are the latest trend, not everyone agrees that schools should offer them.  Joshua Kim Insight Higher Ed article Why Every University Does Not Need a MOOC noted that offering free material may not make sense for the individual university.  It may be more important to stand out in other ways.

MOOCs are free non-degree online courses with open unlimited global enrollment to anyone who desires to learn, and regardless of their current educational level.

Regardless of your personal opinion on the value of these Massive Open Online Courses, the current reality for many low income, and underserved student populations in the US, and globally is that these free open courses from some of the world's leading experts is a  partial win of the "Educational Access Lottery"©.

Today, MOOCs provide access to many of the same courses being taught at some of the world's leading universities, and by leading scholars and industry experts in all areas: 

However, not much commentary looks at the history of MOOCs with an approach to understanding why so many universities are creating them and massive numbers of students are joining them.

An influence to many other ideas in the future, the Open University revitalized distance education because it combined correspondence instruction, supplementary broadcasting and publishing, residential short courses and support services at local and regional levels.

Much of the MOOC philosophy is based on their special approach to higher education.

The advantages of MOOCs, says Chew, are low cost and flexibility. “You can take a course anytime, anywhere,” he says, “as long as you have an Internet connection.”The Internet, says Grim, connects MOOCs students in other ways.“Students can organize online discussion boards,” she says. “They can get together with each other and ask questions and figure things out on their own. In the process they can get to know people all over the world.”MOOCs have caused “great turbulence” in American higher education, Chew and Grim conclude in their paper, and could soon do so in other countries.“With the open environment of the Internet, and the large profits that can possibly be made using MOOCs as an inexpensive alternative to higher education,” they write, “it is just a matter of time before the effects currently being felt in the U.S. spread throughout the world.”“I don’t really think MOOCS will be a revolution,” says Chew, “but universities will definitely need to keep an eye on MOOCS, how [this] evolves and how it can affect our current mode of teaching.”

The future of higher education is online. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are classes that are offered online, free of charge.