By Jonathan Haber

No presentation by the leader of a major MOOC organizations would be complete without the tale of a student dodging bullets or walking from a remote village to a slightly less remote school to participate in a massive online course (with extra points for inspiration when these tales end with said students finishing at the top of their global class).

The thing is, these stories are all genuine. With global open enrollment, a student was able to balance completing Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity AI course with struggling to survive in war-torn Afghanistan. Nigerian and Pakistani educators have dedicated the few hours of electricity and bandwidth they have available each day to run the computer, router and projector needed to let students complete MOOCs in distant rural classrooms. And no happy ending has gotten more airplay than the tale of Battushig Myanganbayar, the 15-year-old “Boy Genius of Ulan Bator” in Mongolia who anchored his successful application to MIT with the top score he received in Anant Agarwal’s edX course in Circuits and Electronics.