IJCIET 09 13 118.Pdf. IJCIET 09 13 118.Pdf. IJCIET 09 13 118.Pdf

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International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (IJCIET)
Volume 9, Issue 13, December 2018, pp. 1156-1163, Article ID: IJCIET_09_13_118
Available online at http://www.iaeme.com/ijciet/issues.asp?JType=IJCIET&VType=9&IType=13
ISSN Print: 0976-6308 and ISSN Online: 0976-6316
© IAEME Publication Scopus Indexed
MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES: CURRENT
TRENDS AND DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS
Sergey Shishov, Galina Yulina, Nadezhda Vinogradova, Zhanna Dibrova and Raziyat
Rabadanova
Federal State Budget Educational Institution of Higher Education "K.G. Razumovcky
Moscow State University of technologies and management (the First Cossack University)",
Zemlyanoy Val, 73, Moscow, 109004, Russia
ABSTRACT
A MOOC (massive open online course) is a type of online course in which a large
number of participants can take part (up to 50,000), with an open access to all materials
on the Internet.
The purpose of the article is to analyze massive open online courses (MOOCs) and
promising ways of using them.
The article analyzes the current activities of MOOCs, presents the differences
between traditional distance courses and MOOCs, discusses the possibilities of
specialization of MOOCs, and highlights the prospects and problems of the
introduction of MOOCs into the educational process.
Keywords: Internet, massive open online courses, MOOC, online platforms,
multimedia content.
Cite this Article: Sergey Shishov, Galina Yulina, Nadezhda Vinogradova, Zhanna
Dibrova and Raziyat Rabadanova, Massive Open Online Courses: Current Trends and
Development Prospects, International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology,
9(13), 2018, pp. 1156-1163
http://www.iaeme.com/IJCIET/issues.asp?JType=IJCIET&VType=9&IType=13
1. INTRODUCTION
The world of modern rapid and profound changes in all spheres of human life is called,
according to Bauman, "liquid modernity", emphasizing the new, pliant nature of the world
without barriers, borders and obligations [1]. The quality of the "liquid" of modernity also
depends on the fact that gradually an increasing percentage of human activity is connected with
the virtual environment, with the network world of flowing information. The pace of
information technology is accelerating exponentially every day, and the impact of technology
and the Internet on people's life becomes so deep and comprehensive that simply monitoring
and fixation of new forms, tools, and effects of this impact leaves no time for reflection.

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According to statistics, in some countries already more than 80% of the population has
Internet access, in particular in Great Britain (91.6%), the Republic of Korea (92.3%), Japan
(90.6%), Germany (88.4%), USA (87.4%), and France (83.8%). China has the largest number
of Internet users in the world – 674 million people, which is 49.5% of the country's total
population [2]. Moreover, the Internet is becoming increasingly mobile; already about 59% of
Internet users have access to networks from mobile devices – smartphones, tablets, readers,
etc. [3]. At the same time, a person not only searches for information on the Internet but also
communicates, reads, has fun, learns, solves real everyday problems and tasks.
The processes of continuous changes in society cannot but affect the educational process.
The rapid growth of online educational platforms, open virtual educational content,
gamification of learning, widespread use of technology in the educational process indicate that
in recent years there have been rapid changes in approaches to nonacademic education. The
idea of affordable and quality education for a wide range of students is gaining popularity in
society. According to J. Dewey, education indeed becomes a vital need and the only possibility
of further existence in modern conditions.
The emergence of massive open online courses and platforms, a large number of
educational computer programs, websites and applications, including those with free content,
all of these open education for the general public. It was the idea of accessible, inclusive
education, knowledge in a wide and free access that formed the basis for the creation of the
newest educational online platforms, in particular, MOOCs – massive open online courses.
2. ANALYSIS OF MOOC ACTIVITIES
Massive open online courses (hereinafter referred to as MOOCs) are a form of distance
education; these are educational courses for studying certain disciplines using information
technologies and the Internet.
The emergence of a large number of MOOC online courses began in the 2010s [4-5]. One
of the first MOOC was an online course created by Stanford University in 2011, for which 160
thousand people enrolled. Since then, the number of MOOCs has grown to more than 5
thousand courses. Coursera, FutureLearn, Edx, Udacit, German Iversity platform, Russian
Open Education and many others offer a wide range of online disciplines and entire courses in
several disciplines for a large number of people and they are gaining popularity.
MOOCs offer a wide range of disciplines to study a large number of areas: engineering,
humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, information
technology, and others. Online courses students' priorities remain unchanged throughout all the
years of their existence: the most popular are courses on the basics of computer science,
statistics, business, and management. For learning creative disciplines (music, art), special
online educational platforms for virtual learning appear, for example, the Russian illustrator
online school [6] or the new Kadenze online platform for creative people founded in mid-2015
[7], offers online courses for artists and musicians.
MOOC Internet platforms work closely with the world's leading universities, educational
organizations, and individual teachers and provide them with a platform for transmitting their
knowledge to millions of students around the world. Teaching disciplines on MOOC platforms
includes video and audio lectures, online seminars, webinars and web conferences, discussion
clubs in the online mode or chat mode, comments and forums, online tests, teachers' and
students' feedback, etc. A course usually ends with an assessment of students' progress and the
issuance of certificates or diplomas upon graduation.

Massive Open Online Courses: Current Trends and Development Prospects
MOOCs are commercial or nonprofit private institutions that operate according to different
schemes. Some MOOCs offer absolutely free courses, declaring their humanitarian and
educational mission, setting a fee only for obtaining a certificate at the end of the course (if
someone wishes to receive it) and existing through donations, including from giant
corporations like Google. Other online courses charge fees for enrollment and tuition, but as a
rule, this fee is small compared to full-time study.
However, as announced by the US Department of Education on October 15, 2015, from
this year in the United States, participants of nonformal educational programs can also receive
financial support from the state, which means that the state can help with funding MOOC
education. This EQUIP initiative (The Educational Quality through Innovative Partnership) is
dedicated to the development of partnerships between higher education institutions and
nonformal educational institutions for developing joint programs [8].
The number of students who register for MOOC courses is growing exponentially every
month, for example, the largest MOOC platform Coursera was founded in April 2012 and as
of November 2018, it has already trained 35 million students [9].
The attractiveness of MOOCs for potential students is related to the following:
- a MOOC student can study at any place and at any time, according to his or her own
schedule;
- the student learns at his/her own pace – quickly or slowly (although some courses set
deadlines before the end of which work must be done);
- there are no age limits for MOOC students: training is available both for schoolchildren
and for those who are already working and wanting to increase their level of professionalism;
- Finally, MOOC students have the opportunity to join the training in a global context,
because the majority of MOOC courses and disciplines are presented by world leaders in
education – the best world universities.
Undoubtedly, the involvement of classical universities in the creation and implementation
of MOOC courses is one of the most interesting trends of the past few years. Thus, the list of
partners of the largest MOOC Platform Coursera amazes: the platform collaborates with more
than 130 universities of the world, including Yale University, Stanford University, University
of Michigan, Princeton University, University of Zurich, University of London, University of
Tokyo, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tel Aviv University, etc.
In Russia, Coursera’s partner universities are the Higher School of Economics (HSE),
Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), Sberbank Corporate University, St.
Petersburg State University, Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO),
Novosibirsk State University, Tomsk State University,
Today, with a view of evaluating MOOCs and their impact on teaching, training, and
education in general, a number of studies are conducted in the whole world, in particular, on
the initiative of the MRI (MOOC Research Initiative). Research points to the peculiarities of
MOOCs and their significant differences from conventional online courses, which until
recently had been "traces" from traditional university courses.
However, modern MOOCs differ from traditional distance courses (DC) both in the number
of participants and nonlinear types of connections and in the principle of interaction among
participants in the educational process.
According to the authors, the differences between the traditional DC and MOOCs can be
considered on the main aspects presented in Table 1.

Rabadanova
Table 1 Differences between traditional DC and MOOCs
Aspect Traditional DC МООС
Platform
Moodle, eLearning Server,
LearningSpace 5.0, ILIAS,
M-Learning
Coursera, edX, Udacity, XuetangX,
KhanAcademy, FutureLearn, MIT
OpenCourseWare, Canvas
Content
Multimedia
Creation
Absence of own multimedia
content means
The possibility of making your own multimedia
content
Structure
features
Required elements:
introduction, course authors,
tutor, course news, course
program, home page
Consist of short video lectures, quizzes, and a
final exam. An important point is the principle of
selectivity.
Language Usually one language
The possibility of organizing a course in any
language (taking into account the main target
audience)
Duration of
training
From several months to a
year
From several weeks to several months
Informative
value
Only structured and
visualized basic information
Redundancy of information
Organization of
educational process
Organized on the basis of
curricula.
Does not depend on the
number of participants.
Division of participants into
roles (administrator, course
author, tutor, student, guest).
Control of the amount of
material passed and the
quality of its assimilation
Each course participant builds their own learning
path.
The role of the learning process is increasing. Use
of popular information resources.
Requires as many active participants as possible
for optimal performance.
The roles of teacher and student in these courses
are almost erased.
Possible tasks and tests without evaluation.
Display of progress in studying the material.
Features of MOOC in the field of higher education are due to all of the above aspects, as
evidenced by both global and domestic experience.
3. SPECIALIZED ONLINE HUMANITARIAN COURSES
The term "specialization", which appeared more recently in MOOC practice, means a sequence
of related courses in the subject area, which allow a listener to study the subject in depth and
then apply this knowledge in practice in a special project.
At the beginning of 2018 on the Coursera platform, several "specializations" were
implemented, dedicated to the educational industry. Table 2 contains the analysis of the
following specializations: Virtual Teacher; The Teacher: Social and Emotional Learning; New
Technologies: From Smartphones to the Internet of Things and Big Data [9].

Table 2 Some specializations of the Education category of the Coursera project
№ Course name Summary
Number of
courses
Year
1 Virtual Teacher
The study of the best practices for online
learning, engaging students and creating a
virtual community; effective use of
asynchronous and synchronous technologies,
social networks and other new technologies;
methods of analyzing data and measuring
student performance to personalize learning in
an online environment.
5 2018
2
The Teacher: Social and
Emotional Learning
The central idea of this course is that the
teacher should know a student as an
individual. To help students achieve a certain
level of well-being, teachers must be aware of
their own well-being.
6 2018
3
Emerging Technologies:
From Smartphones to IoT to
Big Data
Concepts of the most important information
technologies that are currently used and will
be used in the future are studied: smartphones,
operating systems, cloud computing, Big Data,
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile communications,
IoT, augmented reality, etc.
6 2018
The following is a detailed description of some of the courses listed in Table 2. In the
Virtual Teacher specialization, students should explore how recent trends in the use of
technology affect learning and student engagement in secondary education, what innovative
learning spaces and tools are available to teachers. How teachers can best use free and open
resources for deeper engagement of students in learning. The possibilities and challenges of
using technologies in full-fledged online environments are discussed, as well as ideas that can
be applied in mixed and traditional environments. The authors believe that after completing
this course, students will be able to:
1. Understand the role of technology in distributing content, promoting collaboration and
evaluating students, courses, and organizations.
2. Identify and evaluate the value of existing and new technologies in the virtual course and
curriculum development.
3. Develop and evaluate learning activities that use social learning tools.
4. Develop and evaluate learning activities that use strategic skills and/or game-based
badges to enhance students' participation in virtual courses.
5. Explore, critically evaluate and use open content in virtual education.
6. Discuss the role of MOOCs in virtual education at schools.
Courses in this specialization can be chosen in any order. Each course can be taken
independently. Specialization is completed with a final project that allows integrating and
applying skills acquired during training.
The specialization Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is associated with concerns about
the formation of five individual competencies among students: self-awareness; self-
government; social awareness; relationship skills; and finally, responsible decision making.
The authors of the specialization note that, despite the fact that many of SEL's secondary
education programs emphasize a student's social and emotional learning, there are only a few
programs to promote and help teachers learn their own emotional well-being. The central idea

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of this specialization is that in order to help students achieve a certain level of well-being,
teachers should be aware of their own well-being.
4. PROSPECTS AND PROBLEMS OF MOOCS
Classical universities use MOOC platforms to expand their capabilities. It is no secret that
nowadays budget expenditures on traditional education are decreasing all over the world, and,
first of all, it is humanitarian specialties that suffer. In addition, according to British literary
critic and philosopher Terry Eagleton, modern universities are increasingly turning into
business projects, teachers – into managers, and students – into consumers, which leads to the
fact that universities begin to indulge the interests of consumers in competition for students,
and the author predicts the slow death of classical universities [10]. All this leads to curtailing
the teaching of humanities, reducing programs and targeting more competitive and popular
specialties. Of course, education must respond to the demands of society. The use of online
educational platforms has a chance to become one of the opportunities for universities to
expand the teaching of the humanities for a wide range of students, not limited to only
university students. Courses in a virtual environment can help universities increase the number
of students, reach wider audience and advertise their university, attracting full-time and part-
time, distance learning students, and may allow partially shifting the teaching of market
disciplines and courses to online educational platforms, freeing more time and resources for
classic and full-time courses. It remains to be seen how the relations between MOOCs and
universities will develop, but the opportunity to use the popularity of MOOC platforms cannot
but interest universities, because universities are always at the center of all global changes.
Since MOOCs are built on virtual learning, the dependence of learning on Internet
connectivity, in turn, causes certain threats to the learner and to society as a whole. Among
such threats of virtual education, the following are highlighted:
First, a potential MOOC listener faces a difficult choice of reliable resources and sources
for education, because the Internet is full of sites and information, the quality and reliability of
which are difficult to verify. In this case, the reputation of a traditional institution of higher
education – a partner university of an online educational platform – will play almost the biggest
role in choosing courses for study.
Secondly, in the modern changing world, changes also occur with a person, who is
undergoing not only profound psychological transformations but also physiological ones under
the influence of the virtual world. Thus, less and less information is stored in long-term
memory, and a person begins to rely on the Internet as an archive of information. Moreover,
sometimes access to information becomes too easy, so a person no longer needs to rely on his
or her knowledge at all, because the correct answer lies nearby, one just needs to reach out to
a keyboard and computer monitor. In 2011, the experiments of American scientists proved the
existence of the so-called "Google effect", which is that people who are used to access the
Internet to solve complex issues, in the future will have the worst indicators of remembering
information [11]. A person already has a habit of not storing complex information in memory
if he or she expects to find it on the Internet without any problems. The Internet is gradually
becoming the main form of a person's external memory, and such "trust" in information stored
on the Internet cannot but cause concern, because the habit of trusting the network can lead to
its manipulative use and to limit access to information.
Third, MOOC courses imply a lack of balance between practice and theory. Courses offer
practical training limited to seminars and partially practical tasks, but a person will have to use
acquired knowledge in practice independently. Of course, not everything can be learned online,
some activities can be transferred from a master to a student only through practice, through

their own mistakes and their comprehension, through their own experience and the experience
of a mentor in the learning process.
Nevertheless, MOOC courses are currently experiencing exceptional popularity and
interest from both potential students and investors, and the dynamics of their growth and the
pace of increasing didactic and financial resources are impressive.
5. CONCLUSION
The emergence of massive open online courses is one of the key events in the history of the
development of education in recent years. Millions of people around the world have the
opportunity to remotely take training courses from the most prestigious educational institutions
in the world. The main feature and at the same time the advantage of massive open online
courses is that anyone who wants can study (no age, territorial, financial or other restrictions),
at any time (video lectures, interactive tasks, and discussion forums are available 24 hours) and
anywhere (with Internet access and access to the network) using any device – a computer,
laptop, tablet or phone. In addition, most of these courses are free; there is a fee only for a
verified certificate.
The availability of MOOCs, their convenience and no fee in comparison with the limited
capacity of universities to offer training courses to everyone and their high tuition fees, and the
rapid development of computer and Internet technologies, as well as the interest of many people
in self-education, made them popular all over the world, including in Russia.
Numerous MOOCs are still testing different approaches to learning, business models and
methods of communication with students. Nevertheless, the future undoubtedly will belong to
open online learning and interactive educational technologies. If owners, investors, universities
and all interested parties succeed in achieving the declared goals – free, high-quality and
affordable education for all – MOOCs can be a means of realization of the idea of lifelong
education.
REFERENCES
[1] Bauman, Z. Tekuchaya sovremennost [Liquid Modernity]. St. Petersburg: Piter, 2008, pp.
240.
[2] Top 20 Countries with the Highest Number of Internet Users. Internet World Stats: Usage
and Population Statistics, 2017. https://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.html
[3] Blank, G., Dutton, W. H. The Emergence of Next Generation Internet Users. International
Economics and Economic Policy, 11, 2014, pp. 29-47.
[4] Daniel, J. S. What Role for Open Universities when eLearning Becomes Universal? In The
Future of ODL for 'Knowledge Network Society' KNOU's 40th Anniversary Forum, 2012,
pp. 9-71.
[5] McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G., Cormier, D. The MOOC Model for Digital
Practice, 2010.
https://oerknowledgecloud.org/sites/oerknowledgecloud.org/files/MOOC_Final.pdf
[6] Russian illustrator online school. http://bangbangeducation.ru
[7] Kadzene. Kadenze and Kannu are trademarks of Kadenze, Inc. https://www.kadenze.com/
[8] The U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology. (n.d.). Educational
Quality through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP). https://tech.ed.gov/equip/
[9] Coursera Official Website. (n.d.). https://about.coursera.org/
[10] Eagleton, T. The Slow Death of the University. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2015.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Slow-Death-of-the/228991/

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[11] Sparrow, B., Liu, J., Wegner, D. M. Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences
of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 2011, pp. 776-778.

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