MOOCs Overview
The development of the Internet and the Information and Communication Technology has enabled the creation of contents, expanding the learning through distance courses, most recently the MOOCs.
The MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses - Open Courses Online Massive) are open courses developed by universities. Given its free nature, they have a large number of student’s subscribers, which are geographically dispersed and not affiliated with the education institution.
The MOOCs appeared in 2008 to describe a particular model of online course developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes.
This concept has evolved through time. According Vizoso (2013) there are two streams of courses: the cMOOC and xMOOC. The cMOOC uses a participatory and collaborative methodology. These courses coming of the first initiatives of George Siemens are based on the principle of connectivism. In cMOOCs, the participants can have a feeling of disorientation; participation is timely, students are discouraged throughout the course and the participant need to have digital competence. The second current, ie the xMOOC have a more traditional view of knowledge and learning being “the student a duplicator and not a content generator”. In xMOOCs the interaction between the participants is weak: the course is focused on the teacher, the content and the assessment is traditional (MORGADO & SILVA, 2013). In summary, cMOOCs focus on the creation and generation of new knowledge, while xMOOCs aim to duplicate the knowledge to other students, whose education is based on traditional and is more likely to motivate discussions on innovation in higher education (Gaebel, 2013). However, both have the characteristics, systematized in Figure 1.