The development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has stimulated educational research and challenged the existing models of distance and online learning. New questions have emerged that could be answered and administered across thousands of students. Although data on the engagement of this large number of online learners is quite accessible for researchers, they are usually limited to few sources. Very few researchers have data from different courses, institutions and/or platforms. Student privacy and data protection regulations tend to limit data sharing and suppress collaborative research that is necessary for addressing some of the main challenges MOOC research is currently facing. The MOOC Data Science Commons is a collaborative platform that tends to bring the next generation of MOOC research, allowing for generalized MOOC data organization and shared analytics. The aim of the project is to bring together educational researchers, computer science researchers, machine learning researchers, technologists, database and big data experts to advance MOOC data science.