The development of MOOCs is rooted within the ideas of openness in education, namely, that knowledge should be shared freely and the desire to learn should be met without demographic, economic, and geographical constraints [258]. As ex- plained earlier in the introduction section, the idea was to allow people to access online materials and courses with no cost. Learners would be able to freely register and access courses online wherever they are located. From the Stanford University experiment, several platforms can deliver MOOC-format open online courses. As of June 2013, some widely recognised MOOC platforms, as described by Ryan [258] and Grainger [126], include the following.
Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/) [73]. Founded in 2012 by Stanford aca-
demics, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera is currently the largest educa- tional platform for MOOC, and it is a for-profit enterprise for higher educational institutions. They have over 82 partner universities, over 386 courses, and a student enrolment of over 3.5 million registered between 2012 and 2013 [219, 258, 126].
EdX (https://www.edx.org/) [99, 168]. Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched its MITx platform in 2011. It became a non-profit venture when MIT and Harvard collaborated in delivering and organising the online courses; hence, the name was change to edX. Their initiative could be explained as an avenue to investigate how people learn and study online and the various stages undergone to acquire education online at their own pace in a convenient timeframe [51]. The initial association had 28 members including MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, University of Texas Systems, Wellesley College, Georgetown, Australian National University, ´
Ecole Polytechnique F´ed´erale de Lausanne, University of Toronto, RICE, TU Delft, and McGill. At the beginning, over 63 courses were available initially and millions of students enrolled in the early stages [258, 126].
Udacity (https://www.udacity.com/)[310]. Sebastian Thrun founded Udacity in
2011. This platform is a profit-oriented enterprise for higher education, which works with individual academics as well as technology firms to develop educational technol- ogy for computer science related disciplines and industrial technology. As of 2013, it has offered over 25 courses and registered over 400,000 learners [302, 258, 126].
FutureLearn(https://www.futurelearn.com/)[112], Open2Study
(https://www.open2Study.com/), and Iversity (https://www.iversity.org/) are basi- cally platforms for MOOCs originating from the United Kingdom’s Open University, Open University Australia, and a German education start-up respectively. All three seem to be in ‘competition with the US-based MOOC platforms’ at various stages of online course development [258, 126].
Veduca(http://www.veduca.com.br/). Veduca was a MOOC platform that orig-
inated in Brazil. It is the first MOOC platform from the Latin American regions. This MOOC provider curates publicly available videos from universities, such as the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia Universities, trans- lating the courses into Portuguese subtitles. The firm also offered the first Latin American-based MOOC from the University of Sao Paulo [311].
Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademic.org)[160]. The platform was devel-
oped for kindergarten pupils to learners who are 12 years old. The course is de- veloped to teach mathematics and sciences, such as biology, chemistry, and physics including some elements of economics and history [258]. In 2006, Khan Academy emerged as a global leader for early online teaching. With some initial support from the Bill Gates foundation and other funding bodies, Khan Academy started explor- ing the web to deliver high quality foundational education for free across a wide variety of subjects with different language diversities. Although Khan Academy was originally from outside the educational sector (academia), it is one of the first MOOC providers [285].
2.3.1 Comparison of MOOC platforms
Coursera is said to have the highest number of online learners and to be the largest online course provider of MOOCs in the world. The platform added 7 million new students to its user base, making the number of registered students 17 million. The three big existing MOOC providers are Coursera, edX, and Udacity. However, FutureLearn increased in student size in 2015 and now has more learners than Udacity, making it the third largest MOOC platform provider in the world. In 2015, Futurelearn grew progressively with a 275% increase rapidly approaching a total of 3 million students [275].
Another interesting aspect observed within these various MOOC providers are the courses that they delivered. Individual providers show their numbers and their greatest strengths in single course sessions (as seen in Figure 2.2). For example,
FutureLearn registered over 440,000 students for one of their single course sessions. This makes the single course the largest session of a MOOC. Moreover, edX was the first MOOC platform to go beyond issuing single course certificates as of September 2013 for completing a sequence of courses. In 2014, Coursera and Udacity launched similar programmes. These ‘big 3’ are competing to established their marks by creating new credentials, using their brands.
The main goal of these credentials is to demonstrate the competence level for high demand skills. The downside is that many students are sceptical about these credentials. Fees are charged for these credentials, and many still doubt the value of these credentials in the marketplace and even in careers, the value of which has not been well established. On the positive side, with quite a few learners pursuing the credentials, this small level of success has allowed both Coursera and Udacity to raise funding in 2015 to create more credentials and awareness. However, one weakness found in these MOOC providers was the massive growth of technical and business- oriented courses, which has led to a drastic decrease of students in humanities and social science courses. Figure 2.1 reveals the top three providers by the number of courses in 2015, which were Coursera, edX and the Canvas Network. Coursera, however, has the largest courses and its course catalogue is twice as large as that of edX [275].
Figure 2.1: MOOC platform providers’ course distribution, excerpted from Shah [275].
2.3.2 Different platform languages
It has been noted that the first three big MOOC platforms were designed initially by English language instructors due to their origin. Reports reveal that, as of 2014, the percentage of English language courses has reduced slightly from 80% (in 2014) to 75% (in 2015). These drawbacks came about due to an increase in region-specific providers, for example ‘FUN’, which was supported by the French government, and MiriadX [275]. Another interesting factor affecting this reduction lies in the fact that Coursera, which originated from United States, is now expanding to international regions, thus allowing the development of courses with regional languages. English, French, and Spanish are said to be the most popular languages used in most MOOC platforms, as seen in Figure 2.2.
Barak et al. [26] mentioned that, despite the different languages of instruction in their study, the MOOC participants were driven to learn by similar motivational objectives and goals. However, courses are being developed for over 16 different languages [275]. Boyatt et al. [48] argued that clear majority of MOOC delivering
‘is predominantly English’. This would lead non-fluent English speaking participants to withdraw from the programme due to the lack of understanding of the terms and concepts used in delivering the lectures. This would alleviate much translation in MOOCs delivery platforms to a specific national language, which could reduce the dropout rate from these areas.
Figure 2.2: MOOC providers by instruction language excerpted from Shah [275].