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Ebrahim Afsah, associate professor in the University of Copenhagen's faculty of law, is teaching a class on "Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World" through Coursera. This week his students in Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Sudan were denied access to the free online education due to a decision by the U.S. State Department, a decision Afsah calls "bone-headed."
(courtesy Coursera & University of Copenhagen)
The companies, Massive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, aim to offer courses taught by professors at some of the best universities to any student anywhere in the world with an internet connection - until this week, that is, when the sanctions determination was made.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control within the Department of Treasury administrates sanctions against foreign countries.
A spokeswoman there told the Patriot-News/PennLive.com Thursday afternoon that they have "a favorable licensing policy to authorize U.S. persons to engage in certain targeted educational, cultural and sports exchange programs" and that the office - in consultation with the State Department - "will continue to consider requests by U.S. persons to engage in activities to provide online courses" in sanctioned countries.
"Of course," she added, "under a favorable licensing policy, U.S. persons need to come in and seek a license – without that, we cannot act."
Coursera, the largest of such online education companies with more than 6 million registered students, said Wednesday that it had already blocked approximately 2,000 unique IP addresses from logging into its educational platform.
Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller noted that didn't necessarily equal 2,000 students "as an individual may attempt to login from multiple devices."
Thursday evening, a Coursera spokeswoman said the company had not previously applied for a special license, but is doing so now.
She said the company "is working closely with" the Department of State and OFAC and "both of these agencies have been very much cooperative with Coursera in an effort to find a solution."
It might be a while before a license is obtained and students in sanctioned countries regain access.
EdX, a MOOC launched by Harvard University and MIT, already has licenses to operate in Iran and Cuba because it applied for them last year.
Tena Herlihy, general counsel for edX, said the license did not cost any money, but it took about 7 months to obtain.
Herlihy said, "That length of time may have been related to the fact that Massive Open Online Courses and the organizations like edX that produce and share them are relatively new."
Both edX and Coursera, a project out of Stanford University, were launched in 2012.
In it's official statement announcing it had begun blocking students, Coursera said that "the interpretation of export control regulations as they relate to MOOCs has been unclear, and Coursera has been operating under the interpretation that MOOCs would not be restricted."
This week the government decided otherwise.
That decision was "bone-headed" said an expert in international law and the Middle East who is currently offering a course on "Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World" through Coursera.
"I cannot think of any imaginable scenario where anything happening on a Coursera platform - or that of any of their competitors - could possibly harm any American citizen or contradict any American foreign policy objective," said Ebrahim Afsah, an associate professor in the University of Copenhagen's faculty of law.
"What we're doing in this course is exactly the type of thing that needs to be done in the Middle East if we want to get past the current impasse," he said, "But if you restrict debate to people listening to you already, I wonder how you ever achieve the outcomes of freedom of speech and free trade" that most in the West would like to see develop there.