A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2016). As seen in the last years, these online distance learning formats have revolutionized both universities and the corporate education landscape (ibid.).

When we look for the concept’s beginnings, 2012 was a particular milestone and The New York Times declared it “the year of the MOOC” as several important providers such as Coursera, Udacity and edX partnered with top universities to create an increasing number of courses. By 2013, the number of MOOCs available determined the CEO of Udemy, a provider, to ask “Are we MOOC’d out?” His point was that a hype cycle was created with many universities and private organizations such as Google publishing courses, however, his point was that as the hype goes away, only a part of MOOCs will survive as business models change, economy changes and time.

Benefits

An ubiquitous learning concept, MOOCs allow for flexibility in learning. The students can easily access content created by top universities, regardless of their geographic location or development stage. MOOCs are therefore seen as an important contributor to the democratization of Higher Education at a global scale.

An affordable alternative to formal education, MOOCs are open to everyone for a small fee and the knowledge disseminated can significantly impact especially developing countries academic and private environment.

Criticism

MOOCs have been criticized due to a certain need for literacy that the students require in order to participate, comment, peer-review and collaborate. However, this tends to loose importance as all generations become more tech savvy.

Another criticism is the lack of control due to user-generated peer grading that can lead to a chaotic environment versus the standard education learning.

To conclude, MOOCs benefits, the mass distribution of knowledge is highly important and even with a certain dose of criticism, students that want to learn have an affordable, globally available tool to do so.