Mcluhan (philosopher and media theorist) theorizes that tech driven media affect cognition. In other words, the medium is not just a tool to deliver information; the design of the medium itself serves as a "frame" that affects the way we interpret and understand information. The design of a MOOC would have implications on how participants can learn.

"Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher of communication theory. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.[1][2]

McLuhan is known for coining the expressions the medium is the message and the global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented.[3] Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence began to wane in the early 1970s.[4] In the years after his death, he would continue to be a controversial figure in academic circles.[5] With the arrival of the internet, however, there was renewed interest in his work and perspective.[6][7][8]"

"The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification."[43]"