Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are one of the most popular trends in education in recent years. It represents open access, global, free, video-based instructional content, problem sets, and forums released through an online platform to a high volume of participants aiming to take a course or to be educated.
So, MOOCs are free, large-scale online courses offered and taught by accredited institutions of higher education and school in which anyone can enroll, regardless of age, location, or previous education.
History of MOOC-
The history of MOOCs is not too old. The term first appeared in 2008, by Stephen Downes and George Siemens based on the 'connectivist' distributed peer learning model. Later, in 2011, a few more educational videos were developed by professors from Stanford University and released through open online platforms supported with free web resources. It was not until 2011, that MOOCs would make a name for themselves in the media. Sebastien Thrun and Peter Norvig, professor at Stanford University and Research Director at Google respectively, announced that one of their courses would be given for free on the internet. Over 160,000 enrollees were ready to follow their first lesson in, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” within a few weeks.
Later, they established Coursera as an independent for-profit technology in early 2012. In the same year, other independent non-profit initiatives such as Udacity (set up Sebastian Thrum) and Udemy where established. Following it, MIT and Harvard incorporated their MITx platform into EdX.MIT developed the MITx platform for offering MOOCs, which was renamed edX.
Overall characteristics of MOOC definitions
Bates (2015) specifies the essential elements behind each acronym of MOOC. Common in these definitions are the following aspects to give meaning to the elements of a MOOC:
• Massive: Designed for in theory, an unlimited number of participants. This means that the course is designed such that the effort of all services does not increase significantly as the number of participants increases.
• Open: access to the course is free without entry qualifications.
• Online: the full course is available through internet.
• Course: offers a complete learning experience, i.e., structured around a set of learning goals in a defined area of study and includes the course materials, quizzes, feedback, examination, and certificate of completion.
MOOCs can be seen as the latest sophisticated development in educational technology using electronic media and ICT (information and communications technology) to create VLEs (virtual learning environments).
"The central and dominant aim of education by ICT and MOOCs is to bring the world to the classroom, to make universally available the finest teacher's services."
According to the Cambridge dictionary, "MOOC is a course of study that is made available over the internet and that can be followed by a large number of people."