Massive open online courses - pedagogical overview

Abstract

With development of modern information and communication technologies, education became available to anyone who wishes to learn. The impact is obvious in many fields such as lifelong learning, students' self-improvement and business training. This paper focuses on presenting massive open online courses (MOOCs) as one of the concepts of modern electronic learning that extended traditional educational systems and is recognized as one of the nowadays biggest drivers of educational innovation. MOOCs enable learning through giving access to free education in form of courses from best universities from all over the world for anyone, without time or geographical limitations. This also raises many questions about pedagogical foundations of MOOCs and their validity of use in tertiary and lifelong education. Main characteristics of these courses as offered on some of the largest MOOC platforms such as Coursera, Udacity and edX will be analyzed from pedagogical viewpoint. Also, comparison between two forms of MOOCs will be given, with regard to learning theory of connectivism.