A Comprehensive Overview of MOOCs: Antecedents and Successful Developments

IKASNABAR 2013 - OPEN EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY 255

A Comprehensive Overview of MOOCs: Antecedents and Successful Developments

M. Purificación Salvi and Javier Bravo

Open University of Madrid (UDIMA)


Abstract

In the last decade universities have added in their educational structure the e-Learning

Systems. ICT have eased the utilization of these systems. While in the past education community

put the focus on how to improve the learning process, from 2012 this focus turns into how to

reach a massive number of learners. MOOCs allow massive amounts of participants to enroll in a

course that it is situated in an open environment and it is available on-line. However, it is argued

the difficulty in finding a common definition of MOOCs, since they are developed in different

contexts and with distinct purposes. This paper goes into detail about MOOC movement and the

main concerns about them. There are two distinct approaches: cMOOCs and xMOOCs. The

former is based on connectivism, whilst the latter on conductive theory. Also, five successful

developments of MOOCs are briefly analyzed in order to give a whole vision of MOOCs. Every

MOOC bears a high rate of enrolment, but also its dropout rates are huge. The paper exhibits an

analysis of these rates of the most relevant platforms. On one hand, xMOOCs have caused a high

impact. On the other hand, cMOOCs provides a new model of teaching/learning.

Keywords: education, mooc, dropouts, overview


A Comprehensive Overview of MOOCs: Antecedents and Successful Developments

Introduction

In the last decade the Higher Education has evolved significantly due to massive adoption

of e-Learning Systems (eLS) by universities. Modern information technologies have facilitated

the wider adoption of these systems, since they provide new ways to transmit, organize and

present educational contents. For instance, teachers and students can utilize new devices (PDAs,

Smartphones, TabletPC, eReaders), new protocols (SMS, Bluetooth) and new applications

(learning management systems, virtual labs, etc.) among others (Chen et al., 2000).

It is well known that students can have different personal features, e.g. interests, goals,

previous knowledge, cultural background or learning styles. These features should be considered

in order to enhance and ease the learning process for each learner. In this sense, e-LS have

evolved in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems (AEHS). These systems are able to adapt

educational contents and navigation in order to automatically guide students according to their

personal features. AEHS have been successfully used in different contexts, and many on-line

educational systems have been developed, e.g. TANGOW (Carro et al., 1999).

In the same vein that on-line teaching could improve the learning experience, another

branch of eLS has developed turning into Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). MOOCs

have emerged in 2008, but over the past year they have had a highly development and have

received a great deal of attention from the academic community. This development is even more

evident in US universities. In fact, 2012 is a relevant year, since US universities offered free on-

line courses with no limit in enrolments. This new experience has represented a successfully

milestone in on-line teaching, thus many courses had up to 50,000 enrolments (Gaebel, 2013).


In this paper we present the result of the previous research of analyzing 77 conference

papers, technical reports, educational blogs, and educational journals. We have only selected the

most relevant documents in order to explain the MOOC movement. As many authors pointed out

that the main hindrance is the dropout rates in MOOCs, we show an analysis of these rates in the

relevant MOOCs.

This paper is composed of the following sections: the next section supplies a description

of platforms and systems before the MOOCs origin, the section three contains the MOOCs

definition, the section four provides the characteristics of types of MOOCs, the fifth section

outlines successful developments of MOOCs, while the section six provides an analysis of

dropouts in MOOCs, and the last section exhibits the main conclusions and future lines of

working.

Antecedents of MOOCs

During 2012 the MOOC movement has got a high impact media in Education as pointed

out the New York Times 2012, Hack Education 2012, and Horizon Report 2013. However, the

history of MOOCs is not as short as the people can intuit.

Figure 1. Origin of MOOCs. Source: (Gaebel, 2013, p. 4).


The figure 1 shows the origin of MOOCs in September 2008 in Canada. Specifically,

George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba (UM) developed CCK08

course, also known as “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge”. It was a fully open course

that could be followed on-line and for free. The main topic of this open course was the

Connectivism theory, which indicates that learning will be successful if we learn how to connect

and build relevant networks. This idea of collaborative construction knowledge is the main key

of a MOOC. The course is offered to their students (24 students have enrolled at the UM) and

other learners of the world. At the end of the course 2200 learners were enrolled in this course.

CCK08 course was considered an important milestone due to the high number of enrolments and

the different distributed technologies. Subsequently, David Cormier and Bryan Alexander minted

the term MOOC. (de Waard, 2013; Daniel, 2012, p. 3).

The concept of MOOC is based on different aims that are not new. Moreover, in the late

1920s the radio had an incipient impact in the population due to massive utilization. This fact

motivated representative USA universities (e.g. Harvard) to offer open courses through this

medium. In the 1940s and 1950s this development is increased, since USA universities offered

similar courses not only through the radio, but also the television. For instance, in 1956 there was

broadcasting TV of education programs, such as Chicago TV Collage. This phenomenon also

occurred in other countries, for example, in Australia is launched the program “School on the

Air”. (Matt and Fernandez, 2013; School on the air).

In the digital era the development of MOOCs has grown into the Open Education

movement. This movement promotes free knowledge sharing as well as free access to either

educational content. Even though sharing knowledge through Internet is not a novelty. For

example, Daniel (2012) shows other initiatives on free education by using Internet: Fathom and


AllLearn. The former was a platform of Columbia and Chicago universities between 2001 and

2003, whilst the latter was non-profit joint venture of Stanford, Princeton and Yale universities,

but it went bankrupt in 2006. (Yuan and Powell, 2013, p. 6).

In the same vein, from late 1990s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has

spread free educational contents in the Web. In 2002 the MIT has developed the Open Course

Ware (OCW); it is shown in the figure 1. In the same year UNESCO organized a forum in order

to analyze the impact of OCW in Higher Education. Thus, it utilized the term Open Educational

Resources (OER) to refer to this type of free educational contents. (Daniel, 2012).

It is important to mention similar projects as Khan Academy and Peer to Peer University

(P2PU). Khan Academy was established in 2006 by Salman Khan. Utilizes multimedia to reach a

global audience of secondary school students, adults and teachers. Affords more than 3,900 talks

and tutorial videos of different scientific topics. On the other hand, P2PU project is a California

non-profit organization and was established in 2009 by Browne et al. It is a learning community,

in which its learners are allowed to participate in different courses. The crucial aspect of this

organization is that Creative Commons is being embedding in all courses. This aspect is

important because whatever content is created during the courses can be reused in other courses.

Definition of MOOC

The original idea underlying in MOOCs was to foster open access to Higher Education.

Then, a high number of students could be reached by these learning systems. Nevertheless, the

MOOC community has understood these goals of different points of views producing MOOCs

with uncommon characteristics. Thereby, it is not an easy task to find a common base in

MOOCs. (Yuan and Powell, 2013, p. 6; Zapata-Ros, 2013, p. 23).

Therefore, it is clear that the definition of MOOC is not unique and appropriate to the


MOOCs. We try to address the concept of MOOC by providing its main characteristics:

- Massive: it is related to offering courses to unlimited number of learners.

- Open: it is related to concepts of “open access”, “open education”, “open content”, and

“open source”. The MOOC term can be identified to the first two, since everyone can enroll in a

course without preconditions. The last two mentioned concepts can be confused, as it involves

that course contents are free as well as their use is free for everyone.

- Online: it is referred to all courses are developed and followed through Internet.

- Course: the main difference between MOOCs and OCW lies in that MOOC entails a

methodological system which requires: starting and ending dates, activities, and assessments.

It is striking that many MOOCs don't match previous characteristics as Zapata-Ros (2013

p. 23) emphasizes quoting Willey: “I hate this term. Almost every so-called MOOC violates at

least a letter in the acronym”. But, at least all MOOCs offered to date have been online.

Thus, a MOOC is a Massive Online Course which allows massive amounts of

participants to enroll in a course that it is situated in an open environment and it is built and

available on-line. Depending on the previous characteristics there are different types of MOOCs.

Types of MOOCs

According to Siemens, there are two main approaches: cMOOCs (connectivism MOOCs)

and xMOOCs (extension MOOCs). These approaches reflect different understandings of MOOC

concept. Indeed, they develop courses with different goals and purposes. It is important to note

that according to Thillosen there are two more types of MOOCs: bMOOCs (blended MOOCs)

and smOOC (small Open Online Course – less than 150 participants). (Thillosen, 2013).

cMOOCs

This approach includes courses which follow the Canadian model of first MOOCs


developed by Siemens and Downes. These MOOCs are based on connectivism theory, which

means more constructivist and collaborative learning. Their main characteristics are: they utilize

learning networks, they require the intervention of an expert, and they use a number of free

resources. In addition, this approach does not allow payments for enrolling, but also open badges

as certification option. Successful developments of this approach are: CCK08, MobiMOOC, and

COER13 among others. (McAuley et al., 2010; De Waard, 2013)

xMOOCs

This kind of MOOCs follows the Silicon Valley model, or Coursera model. This

approach has captured media attention of academics and it has caused that educational

community put the focus on this phenomenon. (Daniel, 2012, p. 3).

The origin of this approach could be in 2011 when Sebastian Thrun performed the open

course “CS101: Introduction to Computer Science, Building a Search Engine”. This course was

followed by more than 100,000 learners, but only 10,000 learners passed it. Even though, a

significantly number of learners (over 30,000) was active users. This fact could attract the

attention of the media, which contributes to xMOOCs phenomenon. (Cummings, 2012, p. 88;

Matkin, 2012, p. 93).

This model is slightly different than the connectivism model, considering that xMOOCs

represents a traditional and conductible way in teaching. These MOOCs are used to include

virtual teaching, assessments, and a possible certification. (De Waard, 2012, p.91).

Successful Developments

This section analyzes the main platforms and companies related to MOOCs. The

selection of these ones for the analysis is due to its impact media, number of learners, and

number of courses. Taking into account these three variables five platforms and companies were


analyzed: edX, Udacity, Coursera, FutureLearn, and UNEDCOMA. This paper only provides

outlines of this analysis, but also references of each platform.

It is important to note that it is difficult to provide a list of cMOOCs suppliers, since

these courses are part of individual projects of teachers. Some examples of cMOOCs are

MobiMOOC, Crypt4you, OPCO11-12, and COER13. MobiMOOC was developed by De Waard

at the Athabasca University (AU). In Spain, Cript4you is launched by the Universidad

Complutense de Madrid. In Germany, we can find developments as OPCO11-12 and COER13,

but the number of enrolments was lesser than other xMOOCs courses (1,451 enrolments for

OPCO12 and 1,019 enrolments for COER13). (Thillosen, 2013).

edX

It is a non-profit platform funded (60 $ million) by MIT and Harvard University.

Currently, it offers 51 open courses of different topics. At this moment these courses do not

provide credits, but also a payment certification. Although the courses of edX follow the

xMOOC model, there are a little steps that edX could enrich its courses with the methodology of

cMOOCs. (Yuan and Powell, 2013, p. 7; https://www.edx.org/).

Udacity

It is a profit venture established in 2012 by Thrun, Stevens and Sokolsky. The initial

investment was of 21.1 million of dollar. Currently, it offers 25 courses of science. Udacity

(https://www.udacity.com/) provides a free certification for the learners who passed the course.

In addition, it offers the possibility of official certification at Pearson (e.g. University of San

José, CA). (Yuan and Powell, 2013, p. 7; Young, 2013).

https://www.udacity.com/

https://www.edx.org/


Coursera

It is a profit company founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller at Stanford University

(https://www.coursera.org/). It was launched with an investment of 22 million of dollars, and

currently it is the most important MOOC company in the Earth. It contains more than 300 open

courses and 70 institutions are participating in this company (e.g. Yale University and Princeton

University). In addition, this company provides courses in different languages (e.g. Spanish). It is

important to point out that the American Council on Education recommends 5 Coursera courses

to receive recognition of academic credits. (Watters, 2012; Yuan and Powell, 2013, p. 7).

Furthermore this company is developing a sustainable business model, in which the key

elements are: payment for certification, recruitment (payment to access the interaction files of

learners in order to select the best learners), education research (companies and universities

could pay for the records of learners), and individualized tutoring. (Daniel, 2013, p. 6).

FutureLearn

It was created by the Open University, and it is one of the first European initiatives of

xMOOCs. It is expected that this platform launches its courses in the fall 2013. It is worth

mentioning that some relevant institutions are adhered to FutureLearn from May 2013, e.g. the

British Museum, Loughborough University, University of Sheffield, University of Glasgow, and

University of Strathclyde. Nevertheless, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and

University of London have refused to participate. (http://futurelearn.com/).

UNEDCOMA

It was developed at the National Distance Learning Education (UNED) in the end of

2012. Currently, it has launched over 15 courses, covering a wide variety of topics. It allows two

certification models: certification of attendance and official certification. The latter requires an

http://futurelearn.com/

https://www.coursera.org/


exam at the UNED and official UNED credits could be awarded. (more information can be found

in https://unedcoma.es/).

Dropout rates in MOOCs

One of the main pitfalls in MOOCs is that they have huge dropout rates. This fact has

concerned researchers around the world to focus on educational aspects in order to improve

them. The table 1 shows dropout rates of several MOOC platforms. It is shown a high dropout

rates from 86% to the highest (second row in the table: 97.81%), which is a Coursera MOOC. An

active learner is a user that has completed at least one activity in the course. It is important to

take attention to this case, since it is surprising that it had 52% active learners. The same

situation is observed in edX case. Concretely, the 3.091x course contained 92.70% dropout rate,

whilst 21.04% of learners were active. We could estimate that many learners completed the first

activities, and then they transform to passive learners, also known as lurkers. Probably, this lack

of participation is due to the course activities turns into more complex. In addition, it can be

observed that CCK08 had the lowest dropout rate (86%). This fact supports the hypothesis that

xMOOCs should include pedagogic characteristics of cMOOCs in order to decrease their

dropout rates.

Table 1. Dropout rates of relevant MOOCs

Platform Course Enrolments Passed Active learners (%) Dropout rates (%)

Coursera Bioelectricity 12,000 313 30.48* 97.40

Coursera AI 29,894 654 52 97.81

edX 6.002x 46,000 3,008 13.04 93.46

edX 3.091x 28,512 2,082 21.04 92.70

Udacity CS101 100,000 10,000 30 90

UNEDCOMA Curso 12 35,278 1,641** 4.65 95.35

UM CCK08 2,200 308 14 86

AU MobiMOOC (April, May 2011) 556 40 13.31 92.81

* the learners passed the first activity; ** it is estimated based on the active learners

https://unedcoma.es/


Conclusions and Future Work

This paper has presented an analysis of MOOC movement. Development of MOOCs is

produced two approaches. It is clear that xMOOCs have caused a high impact media in Higher

Education. This high impact has fostered that relevant universities of the world are adhered to

this movement. However, it is difficult to estimate the real impact in universities, since there are

questions to solve. For example, to establish a standard certification system; researchers put the

focus on dropout rates, and whether it is possible to decrease them by using Learning Analytics.

On the other hand, it is shown that cMOOCs could change how the educational contents

are delivered and shared. Thus, this type of MOOCs provides a new model of teaching/learning,

that it is separated of distance education model. This new model is based on conductivism theory,

whilst the latter on conductive theory. This type of MOOCs does not receive the same media

attention, but they are still a research line, considering social learning and Open Education

theories.

Finally, it is important to note that developing a MOOC should require the collaboration

of a group of persons, well coordinated. The group of teachers and the IT people should spend

time in designing, launching, and supporting. Thus, if an institution develops a MOOC it should

be considered: kind of MOOC, goals of the MOOC, and people engaged in the MOOC.


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A Comprehensive Overview of MOOCs: Antecedents and Successful Developments

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