Sandra Sanchez-Gordon
Department of Informatics and Computer Science
National Polytechnic School (Ecuador)
Sergio Luján-Mora
Department of Software and Computing Systems
University of Alicante (Spain)
August 2008 -2,300 participants
Fall 2011 - 160,000 participants
A bit of history (3)
February 2012
March 2012 - 120,000 participants
A bit of history (5)
April 2012
A bit of history (6)
May 2012
A bit of history (7)
May 2012 – 314,000 participants
A bit of history (8)
2013
A bit of history (9)
2013
A bit of history (10)
2013
By the end of 2013:
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Coursera leads the market with 5 million
users from 190 countries and 566 courses
offered in 12 different languages by 107
educational partners.
edX has 1.65 million users from 255
countries and territories and 125 courses
offered by 30 partners.
Udacity has 1.8 million users from 190
countries and 33 courses offered by 16
partners
MOOC Poster by Mathieu Plourde, licensed CC-BY on Flickr
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The significant potential of MOOCs lies
in the fact that they have shown there
are millions of people around the
world, of all ages and conditions, eager
to learn.
The aspiration of MOOCs is to achieve
large-scale participation and open
access via the Internet to anyone.
MOOCs offer great opportunities to
improve the quality of life of many
people by enabling lifelong learning
and inclusion in learning communities.
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cMOOC stands for connectivity or
collectivist MOOC. These MOOCs put
emphasis on students constructing their
knowledge, creativity, autonomy and
social and collaborative learning.
xMOOC stands for eXtended MOOC and
focuses on scalability. These MOOCs are
offered through commercial or semicommercial platforms, such as
Coursera, edX and Udacity. These
MOOCs are based in a traditional
university teaching.
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Transfer MOOCs, where existing courses are
transferred to a MOOC style.
Made MOOCs, which are more innovative,
making effective use of video and interactive
material and are more quality driven.
Synch MOOCs, with fixed start and end date.
Asynch MOOCs, without fixed dates.
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Adaptive MOOCs, which provide
personalised learning experiences.
Group MOOCs, where the focus is on
collaboration in small groups.
Connectivist MOOCs, where the emphasis is
on connection across a network of peers.
Mini MOOCS, which are much smaller than
the traditional massive MOOCs.
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BOOC. Big Open Online Course.
COOC . Community Open Online Course.
DOCC. Distributed Online Collaborative
Course.
MOOR. Massive Open Online Research.
POOC . Personalized Open Online Course.
SMOC. Synchronous Massive Online Course.
SPOC. Self-Paced Online Course.
SPOC. Small Private Online Course
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Internet barrier. Sometimes it is forgotten,
but only around one third of the total
population of the world has access to the
Internet.
Cost barrier. From the students’ point of
view, MOOCs are drifting towards paid
courses in the form of SPOCS. From the
educational institutions’ point of view,
creating a MOOC is getting more expensive
because quality keeps getting higher.
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Language barrier. The majority of MOOCs
are only offered in English. Students with
other native languages can have difficulties
related to their proficiency in English: for
example, non-native speakers read at
slower speed than native speakers; the
speed difference leads to information
overload and cognitive issues
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Web accessibility barrier. MOOCs may make
access to education easier for students
with certain disabilities, such as motor
impairment, but their format may be
inaccessible to students who have vision
or hearing impairment.
The MOOC phenomena will continue evolving.
As in Darwin's natural selection of species, only
the stronger types of MOOC will survive. By
stronger, we mean those that accomplish the
goal to provide higher education to people with
a financial sustainable model.
Sandra Sanchez-Gordon
[email protected]
Sergio Luján-Mora
[email protected]
@sergiolujanmora