L'éducation numérique peut-elle réduire les inégalités dans l'enseignement supérieur?

Abstract

The recent advent of MOOCs (massive open online courses) is transforming higher education. More and more universities - especially the most prestigious - provide hundreds of courses through online platforms where millions of users have already registered. These courses are free of charge and available to anyone, and many see them as an opportunity for the democratization of education and the reduction of educational inequality. Digital education is also reshaping relations between educational stakeholders - teachers, students, schools and universities - and the market of education itself. So far, MOOCs have been beneficial mostly to already highly educated students who are able to follow on online course autonomously and have the required discipline - they have been unable to reach out to a new audience and to reduce education inequality. In this paper, I present the advent of MOOCs and their impact on the market of education and I analyze the mechanisms of this failure to reduce inequality. I conclude with a set of propositions to make MOOCs more open and expand their audience to less educated students, which is a necessity in order to reduce inequality.