1. Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
Education empowers people and hence must be made more accessible. With the advent of technology,
learning is no longer restricted to classrooms. Anyone with access to internet can look for information
without going anywhere and in their own time. Many Institutions made use of this opportunity to offer
their courses online, making them available to a larger number of students.
To further make education accessible to a much larger audience around the world, a phenomenon
called Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) was started in 2011 by some of the top Universities in the
United States. In a short period of time, MOOC has become so popular that the New York Times dubbed
2012 as 'The Year of the MOOC' and Time magazine stated that ‘free MOOCs have opened the door to
the Ivy League for the Masses’.
So what is this phenomenon called MOOC?
MOOCs are online courses available to everyone in the world for free. All they need is access to internet.
The first MOOC offered by edX, a collaborative initiative by MIT and Harvard, received interest from
over 155000 students. Since, an increasing number of top Universities have come forward to offer their
courses through MOOC.
Another such initiative, called Coursera, is currently the largest MOOC provider with over 80 elite
University partners, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke.
Limitation of MOOC
MOOC, without a doubt, is a massive step forward towards educating the masses. However, it has its
own challenges and limitations. It is yet to evolve completely.
Learning requires three important elements –knowledgeable professors, good reference materials and
student interaction. While MOOC offers all these, the effectiveness is probably not the same as in
conventional teaching. Most MOOC professors are from the top Institutions of the world and hence
their teaching quality is assured to be good. The study materials recommended by these professors are
also bound to be good sources of reference. However, in a distributed virtual class of several thousand
students, interaction becomes a challenge.
Probably due to the same reason, it is being observed that many students are dropping out of the
courses after the first couple of weeks. Also, MOOC is not (yet) an alternate to full-time education
programs.
MOOC is a recent development and hence is constantly evolving. For e.g., to address the issue of limited
student interaction with a professor, Coursera has come up with a system where students get together
in an online forum to help one another with answers to their own questions. However, if students are
unable to answer a common question, then Coursera gets a professor to address it. Further, students
who perform well in a course are encouraged to volunteer as “community teaching assistants”, to help
others.
2. There is probably a long way to go before MOOC is developed to its full potential. However, it is truly a
revolution in the education sector. Education, deemed to be an essential factor for development of the
human civilization, should have been free anyway.
