Authors: Assistant Professor Nasir Kasam Sheikh, Shri Vitthal
Abstract: A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a web-based platform which provides unlimited number of students worldwide with a chance of distance education with the best institutes in the world. It was established back in 2008 and gained momentum in 2012 as a popular learning tool. Many MOOCs have communities that have interactive sessions and forums between the student, professors and Teaching Assistants (TAs) along with the study/course material and video lectures. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement is playing a pivotal role in transforming the higher education. Courses designed for large numbers of participants, that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere as long as they have an internet connection, are open to everyone without entry qualifications, and offer a full/complete course experience online for free (OpenupEd 2015). As more initiatives are launched, millions of people around the world continue to participate in MOOCs through a small but growing diversity of courses and platforms; and they continue to attract a high level of interest from reputed educational institutions, senior politicians, policy-makers and popular media houses. The key point is that different interest groups and stakeholders have quite different reasons for promoting MOOCs and therefore the opening up of education agenda must be seen alongside powerful forces that view online learning as a means of intellectual development, enhancement in self esteem, increasing competition between institutions, introducing new business models with reduced public funding for universities, and the creation of a global higher education digital marketplace (Brown et al., 2015). On the other hand, they show potential to challenge the closed and privileged nature of academic knowledge in traditional universities. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been a relatively recent entrant in the field of online learning, yet with their “massiveness” and “openness” was posited to have the potential to transform learning and development in developing countries by providing willing learners with ready access to knowledge and Higher Education.
DOI: http://doi.org/ijrtssh.vol.3.issue3.123
