Welcome to the third episode of Techno Sapiens, a biweekly series of six podcasts hosted by Future Tense fellows Christine Rosen, senior editor of New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, and Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment lawyer who has worked for Google, eBay, and Dropbox, among others.* Each podcast will examine how technology—now and in the future—will impact us as a species, and how we relate to each other.

On today’s episode, Christine and Marvin discuss online education with Daphne Koller, a computer science professor at Stanford University and the co-founder and president of Coursera, a digital learning platform, which has partnerships with universities around the world. The hosts ask whether massive open online courses (or MOOCs) will give us all greater access to a first-rate college education—or if they’ll be the death knell for higher learning as we know it.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.

Correction, Aug. 4 2014: This article originally stated that this is the second episode of the podcast Techno Sapiens. It is the third. (Return.)