Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is a model of educational delivery that is, to varying degrees, massive, with theoretically no limit to enrollment; open, allowing anyone to participate, usually at no cost; online, with learning activities typically taking place over the web; and a course, structured around a set of learning goals in a defined area of study. The MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course) are online courses, which are mainly for higher education level. These courses present an interesting evolution in the distance learn methods. The MOOCs do not replace the current universities, but they can be an innovative proposal to the curriculum. In this chapter, the authors present the algorithm they are creating. The main purpose of this algorithm is to create automatic mechanisms as the recommendation system to give such assistance and personalized guidance to students. They will also discuss the integration of this algorithm in MOOCMAROC which is a MOOC platform powred by Open edX.
Top2. Growth Of Moocs
More people signed up for MOOCs in 2015 than they did in the first three years. For example, Coursera the largest online course provider in the world, added 7 million new students to its user base which comprised 17 million students in total.
Around 1,800 new courses were announced in 2015, taking the total number of courses announced since the inception of MOOCs to 4,200. Explosive growth like this means the number of courses is still rising. And it’s doing so daily. The number of MOOCs listed on Class Central grew at a rate of greater than 15 courses per day. But this kind of growth, like that associated with Coursera, is “faster than Facebook,” specifically in terms of having a user growth rate greater than 2,000%. That’s growth from roughly 160,000 learners at one university in 2011 to 35,000,000 learners at 570 universities and twelve providers in 2015 according to ONLINE COURSE REPORT.
Figure 1. According to Class Central (2015). Business & Management, Science, Social Sciences, Computer Science, Humanities, Education & Teaching, Health & Medicine, Programming, Art & Design, Engineering and Mathematics, all of these subjects have seen substantial growth in the number of courses offered in their disciplines over the past three years. Meanwhile, subjects with lower earning potential that do not teach technical skills have sustained decay over the past three years, with Humanities courses declining rapidly from 20 percent of overall subject distribution in 2013 to less than 10 percent in 2015. This shifting distribution shows a pattern of prioritizing career outcomes for learners who are either on the job market or already in the workforce, specifically, that of technology.
Figure 2.
Course distribution by subjects
This is the most comprehensive list of MOOC courses providers: