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After 2001, open educational resources (OER) started to spread rapidly across the world, which led to start an era of open online education. massive open online courses (MOOCs) are considered as the latest development in the field of open online education, and the MOOCs serve for the purpose of education to all and also for lifelong learning with very minimal or no cost to each and every learner for learning. A wide range of courses in different disciplines like humanities, social science, mathematics, engineering, computer science, etc. are offered through MOOCs (Adamopoulos, 2013). The open nature of the courses and no requirement of the physical presence of the learners for pursuing MOOCs attract a huge number of students of different backgrounds towards the MOOCs.
At first the term massive open online courses was introduced by Dave Cormier (University of Prince Edward Island) and Bryan Alexander (National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education) in 2008 with reference to a course called ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge/2008’. The course is also popularly known as CCK8 (Pike & Gore, 2018). George Siemens and Stephen Downes created and facilitated the course (Siemens, 2013; Pike & Gore, 2018). MOOCs are basically online courses in which web-based tools and environments are used to deliver online classes without restricting the geographical boundaries, time zone, and in MOOCs there is no restriction in admission in terms of the number of learners and in terms of their educational qualifications. Siemens (2013), who is one of the pioneering workers in MOOCs phenomenon, summarised MOOCs in three significant formats considering the different pedagogical foundations and organisational models, i.e., connectivist or ‘cMOOCs’, extended or ‘xMOOCs’ and quasi-MOOCs. cMOOCs are called as connectivist MOOCs as well as Canadians MOOCs (because the creators of the MOOCs are Canadian researchers) and xMOOCs are referred as Coursera type MOOCs (Kesim & Altinpulluk, 2015). cMOOCs are grounded on the principles of connectivist pedagogical model that considers knowledge as a state of networking which is generated through sharing personal knowledge with others. xMOOCs are online versions of traditional learning based on behaviourism (Nisha & Senthil, 2015), where a ‘teacher is an expert’ and a ‘learner is a knowledge consumer’ (Siemens, 2013). Siemens (2013) mentioned that quasi-MOOCs are the web-based tutorials in forms of open educational resources. Open Course Ware (OCW) of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Online resources of Khan Academy are examples of quasi-MOOCs. Basically quasi-MOOCs are not courses because these are a pack of loosely linked open educational resources. As quasi-MOOCs do not offer social interactions like cMOOCs or xMOOCs which are automated grading and tutorial-driven, so, quasi-MOOCs are considered as asynchronous learning resources (Siemens, 2013).