Miríadax

» see miriadax.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

2012 was the year everyone decided university was about to be replaced by a website. Coursera and edX both launched inside the same twelve months and the phrase "year of the MOOC" ran in the New York Times that November. Spain's answer arrived in January 2013 and it was not built by a startup. Telefónica Learning Services put it together with Universia, the 1,232-university network that Banco Santander funds, and added the CSEV foundation on the academic side. It opened with 58 free courses from 18 Ibero-American universities.

What made Miríadax different from the American platforms was who it was for. Coursera signed Stanford and Princeton and taught the world in English. Miríadax taught in Spanish and Portuguese, and the institutions filling its catalog were the ones that were never going to be on an American platform at all: Universidad de Cantabria, Blas Pascal in Argentina, Minuto de Dios in Colombia, National University College in Puerto Rico. By 2014 it held 195 courses from 45 universities across nine countries, with over a thousand teaching staff behind them.

The ownership changed shape in 2017. On 29 June that year Telefónica Educación Digital took full management of the platform and Universia was unlinked from it entirely, which meant the bank walked and the phone company kept the asset. Miríadax ran another seven years on that footing, picked up a course-store layer with prices and a shopping cart bolted onto the free catalog, and reported 7 million enrolments as of 13 February 2021.

Then, sometime between 18 September and 2 October 2024, a sentence appeared at the top of the homepage: A partir del próximo 22 de octubre la plataforma Miríadax cesará su actividad. From 22 October, the platform will cease its activity. That was the announcement in full. There was no press release and no coverage anywhere, and the Spanish-language web still carries people saying it closed in 2025 without warning, because the only warning was a line of text above a search box that most visitors never read.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a corporate MOOC is for ~

Miríadax was never a business in the sense Coursera was. It was a Telefónica corporate-responsibility project with a bank's university network attached, and that shaped everything about it. The courses were free because free was the point of the budget line, and the universities came because Universia already had a relationship with 1,232 of them. Nobody involved needed it to return money.

That is a durable way to run something and a fragile way to own it. A product that loses money on purpose lives exactly as long as the parent's appetite for the gesture, and no longer. When Santander stepped back in 2017 half the gesture was gone. When Telefónica's own priorities moved, the other half went with it, and the thing simply stopped on a Tuesday in October.

~ the certificates ~

The part that hurt is the part nobody plans for. Eleven years of enrolments means eleven years of completion certificates, and those live on the platform's servers rather than on the learner's hard drive. When miriadax.net stopped resolving, every one of those records became unreachable at the same moment. The only official answer anyone got afterward was a Facebook reply confirming that the platform was inactive and that former students could no longer reach their certificates or their training history.

For most of the seven million enrolments that is a footnote. For the ones who put a Miríadax certificate on a CV, it is a reference that now points nowhere.

~ where the name sits now ~

miriadax.net kept answering 503 through November 2024 and then stopped resolving altogether. It has no address record today, which means the name is still registered and simply publishes nothing. Two neighbors survive it: miriadax.org and miriadax.es both resolve to a Spanish hosting address, holding the name without the platform behind it. The MOOC wave reached me in English and mostly through work, which is the normal route into it for an engineer who was already reading documentation in English by 2013. A Spanish-language platform built for Ibero-American universities was never going to be on that route. What makes it worth a grave anyway is the scale hiding behind a language barrier: seven million enrolments is not a small thing to lose, and it went out with less notice than a corner shop gets.

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