Online courses attract millions of students worldwide. These courses are presented by many reputable and traditional universities, and as they are available online and often with open access they attract students from all over the globe. The upside of this is that everyone with access to technology has the potential to become an online educated human, through access to information and training.

There is a conceptual question to consider, though. Traditional face-to-face teaching and training usually takes place within a context, with knowledge being locally relevant. Online courses, in their massiveness, however, attract students from every corner of the Earth. Is it possible to make the taught knowledge contextually relevant to each of them? How dominant is the context from where it is transmitted in the course? Are the lecturers and the students enrolled in the online courses aware of possible local biases? In short – do online courses lead to online educated humans or to online indoctrinated humans?

Audio and video recordings of university lectures are available to anyone with access to the Internet. In recent years the opportunity to take open-source, free knowledge has appeared, being embedded in the form of education platforms that partner with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take. These courses provide high visual quality, fitted out with professionally recorded lectures, interactive tasks, discussions, forums, quizzes and up-to-date reading materials. What distinguishes them from e-learning courses is their availability – they are open and in many cases free. The only requirement is having Internet access, and anyone can subscribe to these online courses and obtain the knowledge.

Open education as a concept promoting open, accessible educational resources introduces some learning advantages: the opportunity to get in touch with well-known professors, become familiar with the practices of internationally recognised universities – all of this, in many cases, free of charge. ‘Open’ also means flexible: no longer reading and completing tasks in a pre-determined curricular order; rather having a hands-on educational experience, the right to choose your own educational path, learning in the open pedagogic atmosphere, studying what you need and when you find learning convenient. Learning philosophy considers such education as the way to foster free-thinkers who are responsible for their choices and actions (Nyberg 1975). UNESCO believes that universal access to high-quality education is a key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue (UNESCO n.d.a).

On the other hand, open educational resources are recognised as one of the tools to compete for talented students and spread ideological influence. For example, according to Altbach, the human and social sciences are especially prone to be ideologically tinged, thereby spreading ideological content together with the course content. According to him, we have to ask ‘who controls the knowledge and why does it matter?’, as well as, ‘The question is still up in the air – are MOOCs ideologically tinged and if so, how are we to grasp ideology beyond the scientific discourse’ (2014:4).

Inasmuch as discourse, including that deployed in educational practices, is socially and culturally specified, we assume that implicit ideology is an unavoidable feature of pedagogy (Bernstein & Solomon 1999; Gee 2011; Giroux 1990; Schmid 1981; Van Dijk 1998). Thus, the objective of the article is twofold:

The goal is therefore not to deconstruct the ideological positions of specific online courses, as has been done by Selwyn, Bulfin and Pangrazio (2015) and Ebben and Murphy (2014). It is rather to sensitise and empower lecturer and learner alike to use the tools of discourse analysis to evaluate the possible ideological content of online courses stemming from contexts differing from their own.

If discourse is language in its textual form used in the social context (Van Dijk 1989) or a ‘distinctive way to use language’ (Gee 2011), then what do we imagine when we think about discourse in education? The first images appearing in your mind are probably a teacher presenting a lecture in a classroom, the textbooks teachers refer to, and written and/or verbal answers of learners. There images, however, are reflections of behaviourist and cognitivist learning theories. Keeping in mind the particularities of connectivist theory and the educational model applied in online courses, one could certainly imagine a different picture of what educational discourse is.

However, before we come back to the issue of discourse in education, some extracts from the theory of discourse are presented.

The textual and visual structure of online courses is only one example of a contemporary way of meaning representation. This type of text that represents meaning by means of a mixture of different modes has been investigated by linguists, philosophers and sociologists since the 19th century, initially as a paralinguistic means of communication in writing. Since the 1870s, particular research interest has been aroused in the expressiveness of the paralinguistic means of written communication, to the question of an author’s artistic design realisation (Anisimova 2003). Since the 1990s, the so-called non-verbal features of a text, which accompany verbal commutation to express distinctive connotations, have been attracting the attention of researchers. Decoding of verbal and non-verbal constituents of texts and their interpretation has found its place in linguistics, sociology and philosophy. Creolised texts, as a distinctive group of paralinguistic active texts (Anisimova 2003), are texts that consist of two inhomogeneous parts – one is verbal (relating to language, speech) and the other is non-verbal (relating to a different sign system, presented with iconic, graphic images) (Sorokin & Tarasov 1990).Thus, the formula of a creolised text might look like this: ‘creolised text = text (verbal constituent) + image (non-verbal constituent)’. Taking into consideration that images, graphics and pictures tend to dominate contemporary communication, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) call these type of texts ‘image-like texts’ or ‘multimodal texts’. The texts of the multimedia age present information across a variety of modes, including visual images, design elements, written language and other semiotic resources (1996). The mentioned authors appeal to visual literacy as part of the school curriculum to educate learners on how to interpret these image-text combinations, because images and texts can be combined in a unique way. To decode the meaning of such combinations, readers need ‘new skills of interpretation and representation’ (Serafini 2009).

Multimodal creolised text, full of images, graphics, sounds, colour combinations and so on being widely presented in newspapers, advertisements, comics, posters, Web pages and blogs, is becoming part of contemporary educational discourse. Online courses clearly exemplify the multimodality of educational discourse they apply to create and disseminate meaning (Platonova, Tarasova & Golubinskaya 2015). Because the courses are massive and free, they attract thousands of learners of different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, multimodal, especially visual, literacy is becoming crucial for those who learn from the courses.

Multimodal literacy is a set of competencies allowing effective learning in the digital environment. We derive it from the definition of multimodal literacy as an indication of a way processes of literacy – reading, writing, talking, listening and viewing – are occurring within and around new communication media (Walsh 2010). Multimodal literacy has been relevant ever since photographs, videos, sounds and other modes of knowledge representation began to receive widespread application in communication practices. There are those who create and deliver messages in the form of multimodal text and those who receive them (Mey & Dietrich 2016). Both have to be literate in the same manner to make meaning from the messages and understand each other.

Visual literacy is a part of multimodal literacy, defining the approach to the visual constituents of multimodal texts. According to the Association of College and Research Libraries (n.d.), visual literacy is a set of abilities helping one to effectively deal with images in accordance with one’s needs, that is to ‘find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media’. Moreover, visual literacy enables one to comprehend ‘the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components of image-like texts. If literacies related to different modes of meaning-making such as tactile, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory (Mills & Unsworth 2017) are not widely presented in research and educational practices, visual literacy is promoted to be included in school curricula (Kress 2003).

In the framework of this article we are interested in visual literacy as a learner’s ability to interpret images and extract ideas from the educational visuals he or she watches. Reading images is comparable with reading verbal texts. It is possible to read on the surface level to grasp only the main idea by recognising familiar items of texts, whether it be words or images. One may read attentively to remember the text and see in which way new information may be added to existing knowledge. The deepest comprehension of the text is possible by approaching it critically. Critical thinking is especially needed when one reads a multimodal text.

Technologically enhanced educational practices necessitate that learners get familiar with the ways knowledge is presented in order to transmit ideologies, values and beliefs to inspire the desired actions (O’Halloran, Tan & Marissa 2017; Unsworth 2006). However, living in an image-saturated culture (Kellner 2002) and with visually aggressive advertising, television and Internet, one gets used to so-called lazy looking (Emanuel & Challons-Lipton 2014). On the one hand, reading images resembles reading verbal texts. On the other hand, there are some differences in the way one makes meaning from words as opposed to images. When we read a verbal text, we commonly make meaning gradually, step by step. This way we tend to control the meaning-making process in an attempt to find how facts are interconnected. However, when we see images, we easily become overwhelmed with emotions and may simply become bombarded with several ideas appearing at once. This way we lose control and systemic understanding of the facts described, becoming captivated, moved by visual proofs that look real.

However, there are some advantages for learners when using visuals. Visualised information can help us to learn faster inasmuch as it contains several meanings which we grasp all together very quickly. According to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, learning from words and pictures is much more productive than learning from words alone (Mayer 2009). Moreover, visual constituents of educational texts may stimulate visual thinking, which is a way to spark creativity (Grabska 2015). Risks and opportunities of reading image-like texts are presented in Table 3.

Thus, visual literacy and critical thinking are competencies of the contemporary learner, helping him or her learn from online courses in the most effective way. To critically interpret multimodal texts of online courses, one definitely has to have prior knowledge of visual grammar and the habit of thinking twice or even more times before coming to a conclusion. However, one more thing is needed: a technique – the exact way to follow when reading educational image-like texts. There are techniques for memorising, reading texts effectively, called cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies. However, these strategies and techniques are about texts in their verbal form. What we suggest for online course learners is to apply cognitive and meta-cognitive reading strategies, adapted to approach multimodal texts (Table 4).

Learning is not an ‘innocent’ process. It is a hugely complex process where, as Gadamer (1990:311) said, ‘horizons melt into each other’. A lifetime of knowledge and experiences from the teacher-lecturer is bound to settle into his or her course offerings, creating light to severe influences. Likewise, the student will interact with the offered material, with the whole of his horizon of lived knowledge and experiences.

Thus far, nothing new has been said. What is important, though, is the realisation that teaching and learning is not the mere sharing and appropriation of course content. For many years content was king – but only because content was seen as manageable. Recently the realisation dawned that teaching and learning should also include the ability to master content as part and parcel of the process. The reason is clear, in that the knowledge explosion makes it impossible to teach and learn all that there is to learn. Learners should be empowered to continue on a path of lifelong learning, if teaching and learning are to be effective.

This is not enough, though. To this should be added that social and cultural horizons are equally limitless and that content is not neutral. With online course student numbers running into millions, teacher and student alike need to be aware that relevance is important and that relevance is also local. Part of the course should be devoted to helping students identify the ideological baggage of text and image and to allowing different horizons to melt into each other with the goal of making the knowledge relevant and useful in their local context. Tools to help student and teacher alike to become aware of this may include discourse analysis, as described here.

The development of these kinds of skills reflects back onto the teacher. Self-knowledge is important, and the ability to teach in such a way that the ability to identify implicit ideologies, but transcend them by making them useful, is crucial.

Only by doing this might online learning become an instrument of education and not merely indoctrination, helping to create online educated and not online indoctrinated humans.