The take off of MOOCs was accompanied by the merge of numerous providers such as Canvas and NovoED in the US, Open2Study in Australia, FutureLearn in the UK and iversity in Germany.

But starting in 2012, Udacity (Stanford University), edX (MIT & Harvard University) and Coursera (Stanford University) - three MOOC providers - started to dominate conversations about MOOCs. These “big three” have the largest catalogs of courses, and they are where most students interested in MOOCs still start their experience.

Galway (Ireland) based online education provider ALISON is often cited in industry literature as the first MOOC, pioneering the systematic aggregation of online interactive learning resources made available worldwide with a freemium model. Its stated objective is to enable people to gain basic education and workplace skills.

 

Contrary to other MOOC providers with close links to American third level institutions such as MIT and Stanford University, the majority of ALISON's learners are located in the developing world with the fastest growing number of users in India. It records 1.2 million unique visitors per month with 250,000 graduates of its 500+ courses as of January 2013. In February 2014, ALISON registered its 3 millionth user.

 

 

 

How is it innovative ?

The MOOC learning modality reproduces the conditions of workshops combined to lectures in video format.

Depending on the course structure, the students will experience team work, videoconferences, chat, team building, brainstorming and  so on and so forth.

The professor will play a role of facilitator and coach to teams and to students individually. He/she will give feedback on teamwork, mentor and support students in the construction of the course content. Added to that, videos of talks, professors explaining and bringing the core concepts will complete the formal part of training.

 

 

Why is it so successful?

MOOCs make the future seem more certain, tailored, flexible and adaptable to every person specific needs but overall less distant than ever before.

When edX celebrated its 2nd birthday on May 2014, the team answered questions submitted by the learner community and one question was "How do you measure the success of a MOOC?"

This was the answer of Olga Stroilova, Researcher and Data Scientist:

 

“Before the course:

• Interesting topic

• Effective communications to acquire a wide range of students

• Communicative, collaborative, knowledgeable, excited course team

• Advanced planning to develop good content

During the course:

• Release content on time

• Short personal emails/posts/videos throughout course with feedback and highlights

• Communications to learners to call out interesting / challenging assignments

• Listen to course 'temperature' through performance on problem sets, activity in forum

• Establish a feedback loop with local Meetups, social media groups

Course content:

• Active videos interwoven with interesting in-lecture exercises Interesting problem sets that progress from easy to difficult exercises

• Challenging exams that make students feel like they have learned something

• Balance of different types of content: text, problems, videos, interactive

• High-quality content

• Thoughtful structure

Feedback and improvements:

• Learn from your students -- iteratively make your course better throughout the course and for future reruns

• Learn from other courses -- stay on top of trends in online education to find things that work best

• Learn from pedagogical practices and research”