Recent restrictions on the distribution of Coursera’s content to users in Iran, Sudan and Cuba have raised concerns among Penn professors who offer courses on the website.
The restrictions are the result of trade sanctions that the U.S. government has imposed upon the three nations. The sanctions prohibit U.S. companies from providing “goods and services” to people in the affected countries.
In a recent blog post, Coursera — which began a partnership with Penn in 2012 — announced that it has been forced to deny users in the three foreign countries access to its website in order to comply with the terms of the U.S. sanctions.
Though the sanctions are not focused specifically on regulating massive open online courses, the company has to take this course of action because “under the law, certain aspects of Coursera’s course offerings are considered services and are therefore subject to restrictions in sanctioned countries,” the blog post stated.
Some Penn professors who are involved with Coursera have expressed disappointment about the fact that students in Iran, Sudan and Cuba are now unable to learn from Coursera’s free educational resources.
“One of the great benefits of MOOCs is that they’re widely available to people around the world and it’s unfortunate that some students are not able to gain access to them,” said Wharton professor Kevin Werbach, who is currently teaching a Coursera course about gamification.
At the moment, Coursera is working with the U.S. Department of State and the Office of Foreign Assets Control to gain permission that will allow the company to restore operations in the sanctioned nations. The Department of State has already allowed Coursera to continue offering users in Syria access, as its services fall under an exception to the Syria sanctions due to a general OFAC license.
Coursera is not the only MOOCs site that has been subject to the sanctions. The services of one of Coursera’s peer institutions, Udacity, are still blocked for Syrian users. However, another competitor, EdX, has already received licenses to allow users access in Iran, Sudan and Cuba.
Economics professor Rebecca Stein, who teaches a microeconomics course on Coursera, emphasized that the website is an important learning tool, especially for users in nations like Cuba who have limited access to a broad range of educational materials.
Stein pointed out, for example, that in Cuba most students may not have easy access to information about some of the topics covered in her course, such as the concepts of free markets and individual property rights, because of Cuban censorship policies.
“Exposure to new ideas can be very empowering to the individuals who take these courses,” Stein said. “For an individual — maybe not for every single Coursera user, but for many — Coursera could be a life-transforming medium,” she added.
In summer 2013, the Office of the Provost surveyed over 400,000 active Coursera users who were enrolled in a Penn course on the site. The survey resulted in almost 35,000 responses. Of the respondents, about 200 users resided in Iran, about 18 users resided in Sudan and none resided in Cuba.
Edward Rock, a Penn Law professor and the director of open course initiatives at Penn, stated that the Coursera blockages will probably not have an impact on the future of Penn’s relationship with the MOOC platform. He stressed that the restrictions had to be put in place so that Coursera, and in effect, Penn, could abide by U.S. law.
However, Rock mentioned that since Coursera is relying on an IP address block to determine which users must be denied access to the site, it may be relatively easy for students to circumvent the sanctions. IP addresses are numbers that are assigned to devices and can be used to identify their location.
“I am skeptical as to how effective the sanctions are, because reasonably unsophisticated users can disguise their IP addresses to gain access to content,” Rock said. He cited Netflix’s persistent issues with foreign users masking their IP addresses as an example of such methods.
As long as Coursera continues working with the government to remedy the issue, it will likely become a temporary problem rather than a permanent one. Interpreting emerging MOOCs technology within the context of trade sanctions is “one of many challenges that face a new mechanism [like Coursera] — it is still new, it isstill growing, it is still changing and it’s expected that there will be a few bumps along the way,” Werbach said.
