MOOC: from educational revolution to survival

Authors

Keywords:

MOOC, pedagogical paradigm, democratization of education

Abstract

This article presents a description and a critical analysis of the innovative platform MOOC, whose name is an acronym of English origin (Massive, Open, and Online Course), referring to an open and massive course that is taken online. At first, these courses were believed to become revolutionary, for they would transform the current pedagogical paradigm whereby a teacher gives a class to a small number of students in an actual classroom, replacing it by free online courses with an unlimited number of participants which are completely inclusive for not requiring any skills or knowledge. However, far from revolutionizing education, MOOC appear to have a great many weaknesses as compared to traditional education and, in fact, they need to adapt themselves to the current pedagogical paradigm to strive for survival.

Published

2015-12-01

Issue

Section

Production