Matriz de Riesgos Actual de la Unidad Educativa

MOOCs are said to represent a new, innovative model for delivering free online learning content to learners [141]. Generally, MOOCs have no limits on partici- pation, with some registering hundreds of thousands of learners. In the last few years, these courses have proliferated internationally, receiving much attention from media, entrepreneurial vendors, technology sectors, and education professionals in higher institutions of learning [343]. With no prerequisites, up-front costs, or barri- ers to entry, MOOCs have been hailed as providing free access, ‘cutting edge courses that could reduce the cost of university level education and disrupt existing models of higher education’ [342, p. 1] . Despite concerns over this disruption, many elite universities have moved rapidly to introduce MOOCs to be seen by others as innova- tors in this new educational learning approach. Similarly, a variety of open learning platforms for MOOCs have been developed with initiatives such as edX, Coursera, Udacity, and FutureLearn, providing different approaches to course structure and delivery [274, 333, 137].

The figures on the number of courses, enrolled participants, and completion rates indicate the extent and speed of MOOC growth [190]. For example, Coursera, one of the leading platform providers, is said to have a continuous growth rate of over 6,900 new participants (‘courserians’) per day [258]. It has ‘added 7 million new students and thus has about 17 million students in total’ as of 2015 [275]. Coursera is just one of the growing number of MOOC providers creating diverse open online courses, though not all their courses are free [73]. Similarly, FutureLearn is one of the UK free open online courses from leading UK universities for learners all over the world. The first courses were launched in 2013, and since then, over 4 million (4,907,570) participants have registered [112]. For example, The Open University is a partner university with FutureLearn. It is one of the largest academic institutions in the UK and a world leader in distance education. The Open University institu- tion has taught over 1.8 million students and currently has over 220,000 students, including over 15,000 overseas students [112].

Kop [167] stated that MOOCs started from a humble background of collabo- rative online learning with several people interacting and being exposed to a variety of views, opinions, and ideas. However, over the years they have moved towards a more traditional educational structure, as most of the courses are new shorter versions of a traditional course pattern, which are offered freely, covering several ad- vanced subjects delivered by high standard professors and specialist lecturers from some of the elite universities around the world [258, 167].

Online courses have grown progressively from open access to open edu- cational resources [225], and most recently MOOCs. This new trend is rapidly and consistently growing to bridge the gap between schools and higher education [275, 112, 121]. The rapid and widespread introduction of MOOCs has been ac- companied by high expectations of what they might achieve and of the educational problems they might solve for learners in developing countries, providing support for introductory courses for remedial classes and for learners without access to a traditional education system [106]. MOOCs are growing rapidly and changing the paradigm of higher education [151, 167, 168]. The introduction of MOOCs has pro- vided learners worldwide with rich sources of information to learn [150]. In fact, this has been predicted to change the perspectives of traditional elite universities that were said to be established for the rich and influential and now can be free and widely accessible to learners, including less privileged learners [258, 121, 220]. How- ever, this effect has not been fully established, as there is little evidence for these claims [258]. Similarly, some studies show that these under-served or unrepresented minorities in MOOCs who are now privileged to participate in these new trends

of education mostly take MOOCs for educational advancement [293, 121]. On the other hand, Stich and Reeves [293] argued that these under-privileged learners were also less likely to complete the course.

MOOCs constitute a movement that has been seen by some as an exciting innovation but which is also referred to by others as a challenge for developing on- line educational courses that has led to the ‘question of their viability as a means of promoting education for all’ [132]. Although most MOOCs have organisation and presentation of course material that is well-packaged, instructional design qual- ity has been seen to be low in many MOOCs [200]. In recent times, new learning structures are now surfacing among universities in the form of blended MOOCs. In this new process of learning, blended MOOC learning is keen to provide online education to everyone, especially students at anytime and anywhere in the world with access to the necessary infrastructure, such as good connectivity to the In- ternet [258]. This infrastructural advancement and the popularity of this method of learning has led to some higher education institutions incorporating the trend to introduce blended MOOCs, which are aimed at combining traditional class in- teractions and online learning components, which in this case have emerged as an alternative MOOC model for teaching and learning in the higher education institu- tion context [340]. Blended-learning, which is a combination of e-learning and the face-to-face approach, has been regarded as a new paradigm in modern education [60]. The following sections discuss the basic introduction of the history, followed by the types of MOOCs.