WRAPPING MOOCS – ANALYSIS FROM A TECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
WRAPPING MOOCS – ANALYSIS FROM A TECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Summary/Abstract: Started in 2002 as an open course policy (named OCW Open CourseWare) and then developed in a global concept, MOOC is one of the most recent concepts in online education. A MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is an online course with no limit to its number of participants and open access provided you have internet access. While a MOOC might accommodate enrollment in the thousands, some of these courses enroll far fewer—the “massive” part of the name speaks more to the potential to include vast numbers of students than to the actual size of the class. In the last two years millions of users registered in MOOC platforms and thousands gained certificates or badges. Several top universities started or joined a MOOC in an open or more closed mode (MOOCx). However, there are many who are questioning the future of MOOCs, as possibly being overhyped, the argument being that companies prefer to hire people with traditional educational background in favor to the ones who did their education mostly online. In this paper the authors analyze the MOOCs specifics, based on their evolution, the educational market needs, student body requirements, existent curricula and faculty staff opinions. The history of MOOCs is presented, with focus on the education methodologies, the technical components and the impact on today’s information society. The most known platforms, Coursera, Udacity and edX, are analyzed based on authors’ experiences and on existing literature. The analyze focus on the used technologies, the multimedia tools implemented, and how the entire learning environment is structured. The paper tries to argue the success and failures of existing MOOCs from a technological perspective.

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