MOOC

MOOC, a course offered over the Internet to massive numbers of people, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. The term MOOC—an acronym for massive open online course—communicates both a sense of the mass scale of these courses and the technological platforms needed in order for them to function fully. The term was first applied to a course offered by the University of Manitoba in 2008. While MOOCs have taken hold within many higher education institutions, companies such as Coursera also offer MOOCs to members of the public who are not enrolled in a degree program but want to learn about a particular topic. This entry discusses the development of MOOCs, their characteristics, and some concerns about them.

MOOCs have their roots in distance learning and e-learning forms of education, which have generally coexisted comfortably alongside traditional universities to become an established part of the higher education landscape. The appearance of these courses coincided with a time of economic crisis in which the place of higher education in an increasingly interconnected world was prompting much debate. A 2015 report by UNESCO projected that by 2025 the number of students entering higher education around the world would rise to 262 million, with around 7.2 million internationally mobile students. (That projection proved too conservative: as of 2023, according to a 2025 UNESCO report, 264 million people enrolled in higher education.)

The sharp rise in the number of students seeking to enter higher education from a range of geographies poses a serious problem for physical universities that do not have the space to accommodate them. The increasingly prohibitive cost of university tuition is also an obstacle for many entering further education. MOOCs have been positioned as a means to solve the problem of access to higher education, although questions remain about who tends to gain the most benefit from them. A 2015 study of MOOCs offered by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found people living in more affluent areas were more likely to register for and complete the courses.

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One of the most significant early MOOCs was the “Introduction to AI” course developed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig at Stanford University in 2011, which attracted over 50,000 students in the first 2 weeks of the course being made available, and eventually totaled 160,000 students from 209 countries. Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, also of Stanford University, went on to develop the not-for-profit Coursera. As of 2017, Coursera was among the top providers of MOOCs alongside edX, founded by Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Each of the main MOOC providers works in partnership with leading universities around the world, many of whom are also offering their own massive open online courses, as well as being in partnerships with commercial companies who support the MOOC platform and development. While MOOCs may manifest themselves in slightly different ways, there are commonalities among them, particularly in methodology and pedagogical approach. Students are usually asked to interact with videos by demonstrating that they have understood key concepts by completing a short quiz. The gamification of the learning experience is a key characteristic of this approach.

The problem of grading such high volumes of tests has been a challenge from the outset of this endeavor. Over time, most courses have developed assignments that can be marked automatically by the computer. While this works well for many science-based subjects, it poses an ongoing problem for the arts and humanities. One of the solutions to this issue has been the deployment of peer learning and grading strategies whereby students from around the world comment on each others work. This highlights the importance of Web 2.0 technologies in which real-time, global social networks are employed by thousands of students. This type of interaction is sometimes referred to as a cMOOC or connectivist MOOC, as opposed to an xMOOC or extended MOOC that follows a more traditional course format. In practice, most courses offer a mix of the two approaches.

A further distinction involves access to the courses. While some allow material to be available at all times to the students who can work through material at their own pace, others restrict access on a weekly basis and expect tasks to be completed by a deadline. This latter approach is an attempt to encourage students to engage with the course and improve completion rates. Indeed, the high dropout rates from courses, along with the high failure rate for those who continue to follow a course, are often cited by critics of MOOCs as being a weakness in the model.

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Students can often feel isolated and demotivated without the face-to-face contact with lecturers and tutors that is facilitated within the traditional university structure. Human presence, encouragement, and guidance remain among the biggest strengths of the physical university. The peer framework has been put forward as one possible solution to the isolation felt by some MOOC students.

The pressure to develop MOOCs and the avid promotion of these courses by universities draws attention to the growing divide between administrators and educators within higher education. Administrators, facing the real exponential increase in financing bricks and mortar institutions, have seized on MOOCs as a way to reduce costs while concomitantly reaching a global market. Academic staff meanwhile often point to the devaluation of knowledge and the exploitation of a precarious workforce. That economies of learning should come to dominate these discussions may be inevitable as can be seen in current MOOC providers.

At the outset of MOOC development, a clearly identifiable ethos of not-for-profit education was demonstrated. Over time, however, debates have started to emerge as to how these courses might be monetized or at least become self-supporting. A common trend is developing in MOOC-related education whereby students are increasingly required to pay for examinations and accreditation. This leads to a possible overlap with universities, which can provide accreditation for courses and degrees, formalizing the online education experience. Some universities may also buy in licensed MOOCs to further the expansion of flipped or blended learning.

The development of MOOCs points to a dynamic shift in higher education. The use of online digital technologies in order to reach global audiences presents many opportunities but also raises serious concerns. A 2013 open letter to Harvard University professor Michael Sandel from professors in the San Jose State University philosophy department, who were being encouraged to use a MOOC taught by Sandel, encapsulated a number of concerns from the academic community. Among these was a concern about the use of videos over in-person lecturing; the lack of engagement with books by the digital generation; the balance between financial interests and sound pedagogy; the homogenization of course content; the emergence of a two-class university system; and a lack of high-quality education. Indeed, this lack of quality control within online courses, with their heavy reliance on peer learning, is often cited as a concern.

A further area that has a tendency to be overlooked is the risks associated with surveillance of students. In a series of TED Talks by leading advocates of MOOCs, a common theme was the ability to track student data. This can, of course, help educators to identify areas where students encounter difficulties, but it also has a tendency to reduce embodied human beings to a series of abstract statistics and data sets, while building up a vast store of information about individuals. Thus, unlike more traditional forms of education, those running courses do not see their students, but rather the data that they produce, which may lead to a shift in the relationship between student and education provider.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.