The  Issues of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

The  Issues of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

 沈状圆

  上海中侨职业技术大学  201514

The 21st century has witnessed the rapid development of Internet Technology. Meanwhile, education changes or reforms are successively occurring with the active support of ICT access. Online courses, especially MOOCs, are increasingly prevalent in academia. MOOCs receive a large number of compliments while the prevailing issues arouse education stakeholders’ concerns and criticism.

MOOCs benefits learners in terms of cultivating interests, broadening horizons and improvement in other capacities (Zheng, Chen, & Burgos, 2018). The primary purpose of using MOOCs for students are derived from hobbies and interests. Compared with traditional classes where students can only learn limited knowledge according to fixed syllabus, MOOCs provides an unparalleled opportunity to obtain a wide range of knowledge so students stimulate motivation to learn.

However, the issues of MOOCs are obvious. Due to the little digital equipment or lack of computers in remote areas, underprivileged learners have less access to MOOC via the necessity Internet (van de Oudeweetering & Agirdag, 2018).

The high dropout rate of MOOCs arouses extensive concerns and criticism. For instance, only 7% of the 50,000 students who participated in Coursera about Software Engineering completed ultimately (Reich, 2015). Likewise, the completion rate in Udacity ranges from 5% to 16%, which is still very low despite the accessibility to the Internet in the registered learners (Zheng, Chen, & Burgos, 2018).

Furthermore, students find it difficult to spend extra time learning MOOCs due to the compact daily schedules and complex learning contents.Some lecturers may read the contents word by word with tedious teaching method and some subtitles are challenging to understand due to language and culture barriers (Kizilcec, Saltarelli, Reich, & Cohen, 2017).

Besides, There is little engagement in MOOCs owing to the lack of instant interaction between teachers and students. Dynamic interaction tends to exist in face-to-face class, while MOOCs as recorded short videos emphasizes to impart knowledge, so it is impossible to realize highly efficient communication and immediate feedback in MOOCs between students and teachers, or among the students (Zheng et al., 2018). Zheng (2018) indicated that plagiarism in digital assessments such as MOOCs is a severe problem, and he emphasizes his students with the importance of academic integrity in daily teaching practices.

Reference

Kizilcec, R. F., Saltarelli, A. J., Reich, J., & Cohen, G. L. (2017). Closing global achievement gaps in MOOCs. Science, 355(6322), 251-252.

Reich, J. (2015). Rebooting MOOC research. Science, 347(6217), 34-35.

van de Oudeweetering, K., & Agirdag, O. (2018). MOOCS as accelerators of social mobility? A systematic review. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 21(1), 1-11.

Zheng, Q., Chen, L., & Burgos, D. (2018). The Development of MOOCs in China: Springer.