Contribution of developed countries towards MOOCs: an exploration and assessment from a representative platform Coursera

Abstract

PurposeThe recent spate of eminence received by the MOOCs (massive open online courses) from media to academia is revolutionary in higher education. MOOCs are a disruptive technological innovation which offers open learning with the aid of the internet and delivered by the faculty of reputed institutions, globally. Since Coursera being one such significant platform, its exploration would display the broader picture of MOOCs. As a result, studying it from various dynamics has been the motive of the current endeavour.Design/methodology/approachThe quantitative study of the collected data was applied with help of descriptive research methodology to measure the contribution of the top six countries namely US, China, Japan, Germany, India and UK. All these six countries were selected on the basis of GDP (harvested from official website World Bank – data.worldbank.org/ to Coursera––an online platform providing MOOCs. The involvement of these selected countries was gauged (from the official website of Coursera https://www.coursera.org/) in terms of number, type of contributing institutions, number of courses offered by those institutions, type of courses offered, number of instructors and instructor gender ratio.FindingsThe findings reveal that the United States (US) is the top contributor in terms of partner institutes (97), courses (Specialization courses – 1,267 and degree courses– 40) and number of instructors (1,290). Interestingly, it was also observed that universities are the major contributor institutes in all six studied countries. Most of the institutes provide specialization courses while a very few provide degree courses. A large number of instructors are involved for imparting these courses online. Instructor gender ratio on average is 2:1 (male: female). It was also observed that there is usually a specific common time of starting courses on Coursera.Originality/valueOnline platforms are the main delivery points for MOOCs; therefore, vibrancy and articulacy of such platforms make this innovation a success, and examining such a platform which exhibits such characteristics would present an overall picture of its functionality, development, evolution and future expansion of the innovation (MOOCs).

Continuance Intention of Massive Open Online Course Learners in Higher Education: A Sustainable Development Initiative

“…In addition, edX has an open-source version of their platform which various institutions can use and develop further. The consortium leverages on new technologies specifically data analytics to continuously improve the student experience (Ayoub et al, 2020;Hawking, 2013).…”

“…UNESCO recently created its MOOC platform. One of the first local MOOC platforms in the country is the Massive Open Distance e-Learning (MODeL) of the University of the Philippines (Ayoub et al, 2020;Clarke, 2013).…”

Taiwanese engineering students’ self-efficacy and academic performance

“…However, there are still many challenges related to the process of teaching and learning through MOOCs. Some of the critical problems include the high drop-out rate of MOOC participants when compared to the traditional online learning environment (Daniel, 2012;Sandeen, 2013), the higher number of MOOC participants in developed countries than in developing ones (Hamber, Jaffrey, & Murphy, 2015;Ma & Lee, 2018), a majority of students from English and Spanish speaking countries than from non-English speaking world (Hamber et al, 2015), and a higher completion rate from developing economies than from developed countries (Ayoub, Amin, & Wani, 2020). Therefore, it is important to understand what can encourage more students from different areas of the world to attend MOOCs and what can help them retain their learning.…”

The Landscape of MOOC Platforms Worldwide

“…However, there have been few studies investigating MOOC platforms (see Table 1), and most of these studied the few well-known MOOC platforms (e.g., Coursera, edX, Udemy, Udacity). Ayoub et al (2020) suggested extending the investigation of platforms beyond the few well-known ones. Furthermore, a systematic literature review (Hakami et al, 2017) found that most MOOC-related studies focused only on few geographic regions.…”

“…Therefore, this study investigated the current state of 35 global and regional MOOC platforms from around the world. Cisel, 2019;Conache et al, 2016;Goglio & Nascimbeni, 2021;Li et al, 2014); (c) course duration and workload (e.g., Antonova & Bontchev, 2020;Ayoub et al, 2020;Brahimi & Sarirete, 2015;Cisel, 2019). Other previous studies examined well-known MOOC platforms regarding their (a) business models (e.g., Cornejo-Velazquez et al, 2020;Lin et al, 2015); (b) openness (e.g., Agrawal et al, 2015;Conache et al, 2016;Funieru & Lazaroiu, 2016;Goglio & Nascimbeni, 2021); and (c) mobile access (e.g., Agrawal et al, 2015;Antonova & Bontchev, 2020;Li et al, 2014;Lin et al, 2015).…”