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Massive Open Online Courses

Massively open online courses (MOOCs) are generally said to have first been developed in late 2000s. They are online courses that are usually offered to thousands of students, if not hundreds of thousands of students, hence the term massive. Oftentimes, the students in these courses are noncredit students or learners who are not paying for the course or earning credit. Therefore, they have open enrollment so anyone from anywhere can sign up to take a course.

MOOCs can be considered a type of distance education where online learning takes place; however, there are several characteristics that set them apart from traditional mediated instruction and learning. Although some MOOCs may be designed to replicate the functionality of traditional online courses, these courses are massive and have open enrollment and so lack some traditional course design characteristics, such as frequent, low stakes instructor feedback. In many ways, they are characteristically similar to MOOCs or an online environment where multiple users are connected. MOOCs historically were carried out via text chat through a virtual reality system.

There are two types of MOOCs. cMOOCs or constructivist MOOCs focus on peer interactivity in their design while xMOOCs are content-driven. cMOOCs were originally developed as an experiment by educators in connecting students beyond spatial, temporal, and institutional boundaries around an area of interest, such as connected learning. xMOOCs were driven by technology company providers and content-experts who were educators at notable or elite institutions with a goal of sharing high quality content with individuals beyond the institution walls.

Overview

Both cMOOCs and xMOOCs have contributed to areas of research on MOOCs. The difference in these MOOCs has also led to two primary strains of research situated in their course design: one that focuses on content and one that focuses on peer interaction. Low completion rates of MOOCs has also led to another track of research, which is primarily interested in enhancing the understanding of student persistence and success in MOOCs. Traditionally, research models examining student completion, learning, and satisfaction were inadequate to understand learner behavior in MOOCs.

Student Outcomes

In distance education, student success has historically been defined in relation to whether or not a student completes a course and relied on documentation demonstrating that the student has met the learning objectives illustrated (e.g., received a passing grade, which is usually a grade of C or higher). In MOOCs, the idea of student success can be different. The student usually is not working toward completing degree credits. Therefore, the understandings of student outcomes and student success that have been used to assess traditional distance education are not necessarily relevant when researching MOOCs.

The membership in a MOOC is much more fluid than traditional distance education courses, in part, because students have different reasons for being in a MOOC. Research on retention in traditional distance education courses and programs is already not widely conducted or shared due to the implications this data on retention rates can have on program accreditation (e.g., a program with low student retention rates may be negatively reviewed and lose accreditation when under review). The extremely low reported rates of retention in MOOCs, however, have led some researchers to question whether traditional research designs used in distance education should even be adopted when examining MOOCs. After all, if students enroll in MOOCs for different reasons—some simply out of interest and some for credit—a research design focused primarily on successful completion (e.g., whether or not a student achieves a grade of C or higher in the course) may fail to capture the program’s actual outcomes.

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