The Archaeology of Portus Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a six week long online course hosted by FutureLearn. The course is structured around 4 hours per week of learner effort and has run six times since 2014. It was one of the first FutureLearn courses and was the focus of considerable experimentation, structured around the affordances of the social learning model and the opportunities to integrate a variety of digital interactions within a single course. It introduces learners to the archaeology of Portus, the Port of Imperial Rome, and provides a sense of the historical context, the work undertaken on site and the methods employed. It also uses Portus as a mechanism for introducing key research ideas in Roman archaeology. This paper discusses this course in relation to a broader “open scholarship spectrum” for Portus – a trajectory from mass broadcast media, via citizen science, online tours and open education, through to individual, novel research with open access publications, open data and tools. The paper explores the potential role for open education at the heart of this journey. More specifically, the paper will examine the use that the course materials can have in broader engagements with learners – including Italian school children – and their impact on awareness of Roman cultural heritage in Italy.