Massive Online Open Courses

Pretty much everyone in the world of eLearning is familiar with the rise of MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community interactions between students, professors, and teaching assistants. There is a wide range of courses available for everyone in everything from fashion to technology and from history to cryptography.

Online courses are revolutionizing formal education, they have opened a new genre of outreach on cultural and scientific topics. These courses, as the name suggests, are open for all the masses and can be accessed at any time and at any place. MOOCs collect valuable data on student learning behaviour; essentially complete records of all student interactions in a self-contained  learning environment, with the benefit of large sample sizes.

MOOCs have provided a platform for students to obtain a level of education that was only a mere dream in past. Unlike traditional courses MOOCs require additional skills provided by videographers, institutional designers, IT specialists and platform specialists. Students can watch lectures online at home and work on projects and interact with faculty through video conferencing, these hybrids facilitates large scale feedback and interaction. There are some renowned sites including Coursera, Udacity, Udemy free courses etc which are  providing free education and also boosting  up the confidence level of the students.

Before the digital age, distance learning existed  in the form of correspondence courses, broadcast courses and early form of e-learning but with the increasing awareness about MOOCs a transformation is coming in the world of education, new horizons have opened up and more people are getting connected to this industry either as learners or as teachers. Now-a-days most MOOCs are well packaged but there  is still a scope of improvement for which more research and practice work is required.

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