LEGAL ISSUES AND RISKS OF INSTRUCTION VIA MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES (MOOCS): SMALL MACAO VS. SOME MAJOR JURISDICTIONS

From the standpoint of a MOOC practitioner (i.e., a MOOC provider) instead of a rigorous comparative law researcher, this article attempts to analyze the potential legal issues and risks underlying instruction via MOOCs and compare these legal issues and risks between the small jurisdiction Macao and such major jurisdictions as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the European Union. These legal issues and risks so identified concern the three perspectives intellectual property, privacy, and accessibility. Supported by academic literature, statutes, acts, and court cases, this article elaborates on these three perspectives with respect to MOOC providers, quotes the key legal statutes and acts in these three perspectives in the context of MOOC providers, elucidates the statutes’ and acts’ emphases and the related remedies and penalties for breaches, and probably other details, and compares them across the aforesaid jurisdictions. Some prominent findings are that Macao, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the European Union appear to practice clearly defined and compendious laws to protect privacy whereas the United States’ counterparts seem to be circumscribed by, for example, the ages of the individuals to protect. As such, for MOOC providers, the former four jurisdictions sound to be more critical than the latter jurisdiction in the perspective of privacy. As for accessibility, Macao’s, the United States’, the United Kingdom’s, and Australia’s laws focus on educational institutions. Nonetheless, whether the majority of MOOC providers can be regarded as such “education institutions” under such laws may likely be disputable. In contrast, the European Union more generically enacts a law on accessibility of digital products and services. Even so, to what extent and how MOOCs are supposed to conform to such a law may arguably still be contingent upon each particular scenario.