First, we speak of instrumental value, in the sense of the goodness of something as an instrument or tool or agency. Education, like all human arts, makes use of such instruments. A school or college, a course or textbook, a computer or software package, a pedagogy considered as a way of teaching – these are all tools employed to achieve educational aims. MOOCs are a new kind of educational instrument, and so we can consider their value as instruments for achieving educational ends.

Second, the primary end of education may be considered the fostering of goodness at various activities and arts – reading and listening, analyzing and criticizing, doing sums and calculating, conducting inquiries, making works of art and literature, designing and building homes, healing the sick, teaching children and so forth – by employing knowledge, understanding and technique. This kind of value we may call technical value (from the Greek techne – craft), by which I mean goodness at a skill, technique, craft, practice or art. This is the kind of goodness involved when we speak of a good piano player, carpenter, chess player, lawyer, artist, student, teacher, planner or manager. People can have talents for certain skills or arts, and in developing these, and becoming good at them, they typically increase not only their levels of performance but their enjoyment of life. We can even speak of the art of living, the complex art of shaping a flourishing and contributory life, and consider the role of education in the development of this art.

One important feature of many skills and arts is that they are in practical terms unbounded – there is no final perfection; the good chess or tennis player, architect or scientist, painter or pianist, doctor or lawyer, can keep growing and improving – getter better – throughout life. Similarly, a person can grow in the art of living itself. Typically, the better people become at their arts, the more they enjoy them, and the more they enjoy them, the more they practice them and improve their performance. This is sometimes referred to as ‘The Aristotelian Principle’. Schools and colleges can introduce young people to these arts, though it takes many hours and years of out-of-school informal practice and supervised performance at them to improve at and master them.

When people become good at a skill or art, they often seek to develop it further, and come to identify with it. A person good at gardening or baking pies may come to consider herself a gardener or pastry chef. Such activities are often institutionalized; there are clubs, magazines, contests and so forth to bring practitioners together, to provide information, training and recognition. Many are organized into trades and professions, and in this way linked to the economy, to remunerative work, and through this to the support of life and overall well-being.

Technical value is central to education. The primary point of education may be the facilitation of technical value, of learners’ getting good or at least getting started at and getting better at a number of arts. This may be what Richard Peters (1968) meant in stating that ‘education is initiation into worthwhile activities’. At first, young learners know little about such activities as reading and writing, calculating, making art, explaining events and so forth, but through education they are brought into these activities, get better at them and learn to enjoy them both in themselves and for usefulness. They come to identify with some of them – to see themselves as, for example, readers, writers, computer nerds, gardeners, as well as future teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, craftsmen, artists, architects or engineers.

MOOCs are unquestionably one means of conveying knowledge. Knowledge, however, is for the most part merely the working capital of skills and arts, though of course the creation and utilization of knowledge can be arts-in-themselves: the arts of scholarship. The architect, mathematician, historian, home builder, doctor, lawyer or teacher, however, does not in general acquire knowledge for its own sake but for its use in the performance of an art – designing a home, solving an outstanding problem, healing the sick or teaching the young. No doubt, there are a few individuals who do love merely to acquire knowledge for its own sake – outside of any contexts of use – to take pleasure merely in their knowledge and its demonstration. But we tend to disparage them, call them bookworms or condemn them as show-offs or know-it-alls. Mere storing up of knowledge is a perversion of learning.

When John Dewey (1916) speaks of education as growth, he frequently adds ‘in powers or capacities’. In the terms here employed, Dewey is saying that education is for the sake of technical goodness, and that this kind of goodness has no limits. The whole point of education, he is saying, is continual improvement in chosen avocational and vocational arts, leading to continuing success and enjoyment in life performances, many of which also contribute directly to the good of others, so as to be motivated to improve them even more without end. When Dewey says there is no end of education outside education, he may be taken to mean that education can be conceived in terms of this limitless process.

MOOCs automate and scale up the main components of instruction; one important question is whether, and in what ways, they can contribute to technical value – helping students in getting better at intellectual and practical arts – without live teaching.

Hedonic Value is the value of pleasure, enjoyment or satisfaction. Passive pleasures are those derived merely from undergoing experiences or having things – watching television, enjoying a new sports car. Active pleasures are those derived from doing things – playing chess or teaching a class or directing a play. Satisfactions are experiences of completeness, as when a person has been acting to attain an end and succeeds in achieving it completely. Satisfactions are akin to what Dewey calls consummatory experiences.

In education, hedonic value accompanies many kinds of learning activities. With respect to passive pleasure, teachers can be highly entertaining and lectures fascinating. Indeed, for many students, the main criterion for a course being a good course is that it provides passive pleasure.

Finally, at the completion of educational episodes, students and teachers may feel satisfied. Education has a specific aesthetic dimension, in so far as it involves active engagement that leads up to consummatory experience.

A fourth kind of value is use value, the goodness of something for some purpose. A good textbook (instrumental value), for example, may be good for use in a course, and also for reviewing a subject, or preparing for an exam (use value). Another textbook, however, might also be a very good one but, for example, too densely packed with information to be useful for review or exam preparation. In that context, the latter has little use value. Similarly, a course may be a poor course but still good (useful) in preparing one for one’s major field (as even a mediocre statistics course might be good for the study of economics).

John Dewey (1938) appears to emphasize use value as a component of educational value. He states that the educative value of an experience lies in the two features of interaction and continuity. He may be taken as saying that first, the experience has to engage learners; they have to interact with learning materials, find in them something related to their own ends or even better, provide opportunities for directly pursuing and achieving these ends. Engagement in itself is a form of active pleasure. It is not sufficient for engagement that the learner merely enjoys the experience passively, is amused, entertained or pleased by it. Further, the necessity of engagement for educational value implies that the learner’s carrying away something from an encounter that can subsequently be demonstrated on a test is quite irrelevant to educational value.

Second, the experience must be continuous with the life of the learner. This seems to mean it must be useful for the learner, drawing upon previous learning and contributing to the buildup of powers and capacities brought forward cumulatively into successive pursuits of ends. In other words, in being continuous, an experience is educative by being good (useful) for the ongoing buildup of technical goodness – goodness at some skill, technique or art, the practice of which benefits the learner and other people.

One particular kind of use value is the usefulness of a thing for the good of a person – what we call the beneficial. Beneficiality is thus an important sub-type of use value. Think for a moment of the role of the benefits office in a firm. It may organize pensions, for example, which provide financial support for a retired person’s wants and needs – food, clothing, entertainment and all the things such as active pursuits that make up or constitute a good life. Insurance, again, provides financial support in times of need, but on a more positive note, also provides a sense of security, which may be ‘priceless’. These benefits are not building blocks or constituents of a person’s good – they are its underlying supports.

Many things in life are beneficial. For example, vacations may be enjoyable (passive pleasure), but in the relief they provide from the stresses of work, they are also beneficial – they do the person good. Even a dissatisfying vacation – one that was not as enjoyable as expected – may nonetheless be beneficial – it may give a person a chance to recover from the stress of work. We may say that while it was not a particularly good vacation (instrumental value), it was good for him (i.e., good for his well-being).