David Wiley suggested that there is a huge demand for higher education – a demand which perhaps cannot be met by traditional campus courses for the simple reason that it would require the build-up of an educational infrastructure on such a large scale that it might be impossible. This raises the question of whether it is even possible to hold on to old ways of thinking about education and openness? I think that the risk, if we do, is that education would become for the (even) few(er) and it would reinforce differences between the north and the south and between the east and the west. What’s the moral of this? Instead, it could be suggested, we need to develop resilient forms of higher education based on openness (Weller and Anderson, 2013), i.e. open education which “develops engagement, education, empowerment and encouragement”. This is no easy task however. How can we, as university teachers, create an effective online environment where our students, regardless of their digital literacy, can gain support? And how can we protect those who are more vulnerable in an open online environment?

Bates (2015) gives some guidance e.g. in suggesting that we need to know our students. Well, that is always the case. The thing is that if knowing our students to understand their aims and motives is difficult in campus courses – it is probably even more difficult in a MOOC. The closest an answer that I can come based on Bates’ guidelines is that we need to openly and explicitly address what skills etc. that is needed for a specific course and hope for self-selection. According to Bates (2015) we also need to build learners’ support. Again – that is something which we always need to do but which also risks becoming more difficult in a MOOC. To create a positive and supportive learning environment online requires a lot of time and for those of us who easily get engaged, there is an apparent risk that the task becomes limitless – that we are online 24/7. For sure, we have to, even more carefully discuss what expectations we have on each other when collaborating in an online environment since the possibilities of “hiding” are smaller than in a physical environment where we leave our desk at 5 pm. Does this mean that we should refrain from creating open learning environments? I do not think so – that would not be morally acceptable from a sustainability point of view – but we, at least I, have to find ways of dealing with the challenges.