MOOCs history

An excerpt from the book "The Pursuit of the Golden Mean. Strategies for Balancing Classroom and Digital Learning": The MOOC Movement: Origins and Developments During the Pandemic

Before delving into the different components of MOOCs in more detail, it is useful to briefly retrace their history: how did MOOCs originate?

The term MOOC was first coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier in reference to a course developed by Stephen Downes and George Siemens titled "Connectivism and Connectivity Knowledge" for the University of Manitoba (Canada). The main purpose of the course, thanks to the availability of online tools, was to create numerous interactions among a wide variety of participants in order to provide a richer learning environment than traditional tools allowed. Both Downes and Siemens argued that the transformations brought about by the “digital revolution” required a rethinking of traditional modes of learning. According to the two scholars, it was not important for participants, at the end of the course, to be able to repeat what others had said, as often happens in traditional education. Rather, they had to be able to create something, demonstrating active participation. They designed the learning experience to resemble an online event more than a traditional course, stimulating personal exploration and exchange.

Between 2008 and 2011, the course experience did not gain much traction, and only in the fall of 2011 did Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig release the free postgraduate course "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" at Stanford University, which reached about 160,000 enrollments from students in 190 countries. The course was open to everyone, including non-enrolled students, simply by registering on the platform. Anyone could follow all the planned activities, although no university credits were awarded. As extensively described by Fabio Silari of the University of Florence in Massive Open Online Course: “an audacious experiment in distributed learning” in universities, the structure of the course mirrored a series of in-person lectures at the university, with content delivered via online videos divided into sessions of about 10 minutes. Assessment was carried out through quizzes integrated into the university’s Learning Management System.

Unlike the Connectivism and Connectivity Knowledge course, participants were not required to interact with each other or with the instructor. The educational objective therefore remained the traditional one — a frontal transmission of knowledge through content and exercises designed without any intention of encouraging students to produce additional materials and with a conventional assessment system. Despite the fact that the learning model proposed by this course was still the traditional one and very different from the one designed by Downes and Siemens, it was Siemens himself who published an article titled “Stanford Does a MOOC”. The fact that the course was open to anyone in the world was therefore sufficient to speak of Massive Open Online Courses.

The real take-off moment for MOOCs came in 2012 with the emergence of online course portals launched by leading universities, most notably edX and Coursera. In fact, The New York Times described 2012 as the year of the MOOCs.

Coursera is the world’s largest MOOC platform and is a private consortium founded by some faculty members at Stanford University in California.

EdX, on the other hand, was founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University and began as a non-profit initiative; later, on November 16, 2021, it was acquired by 2U, a leading company in the educational technology sector. Many other platforms quickly followed these major initiatives, characterized either by a specialized thematic approach (such as Udacity, focused on ICT training, also from Stanford) or by a national focus, such as FutureLearn, created in the UK with the involvement of the Open University and the BBC, or FUN, promoted by the French Ministry of Education.

In Italy, notable examples include POK (Polimi Open Knowledge) from Politecnico di Milano, Federica from the University of Naples Federico II, and EduOpen, created by a network of universities. On these platforms, one can find a vast variety and quantity of online university-level courses, in most cases taught by the same professors who teach the content on their campuses. According to a survey conducted by Class Central, a search engine that aggregates all online courses from the main MOOC platforms, between 2016 and 2019, MOOC participants grew from 10 million to more than 100 million.

At the beginning of 2020, MOOCs worldwide already had over 110 million users, more than 10,000 courses, and over 1,000 top universities involved, with a wide selection of undergraduate and master’s degree courses offered by prestigious universities. However, when in February 2020 universities were suddenly forced to move their teaching online, most institutions did not pay much attention to integrating the training paths already available online. The boom in MOOC enrollments recorded around April 2020 arose more from individual initiatives than from a push by universities.

The only exception on a global scale was China, where private MOOC providers have always been strongly integrated into institutional and government policies. In China, the integration of MOOCs into the transition of higher education online, driven by the pandemic, was immediate, as private digital learning providers offered not only content but also digital infrastructures and services to universities. In February 2020, the Ministry of Education (MOE) issued online teaching guidelines, integrating the possibility for students to continue their studies remotely through 24,000 online courses offered free of charge by more than 20 platforms. Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious academic institutions, was among the first universities in the world to address the difficult challenge of how to respond to the virus. In January 2020, as SARS-CoV-2 began spreading rapidly in China, the university wondered whether it would have to postpone the start of classes in February. However, it managed to avoid this scenario by moving all lessons online in a very short time.

The shift to online teaching necessarily required a redesign of how courses were delivered, introducing so-called hybrid classes (extended classrooms). These classes combine traditional in-person teaching with online learning activities. This evolution was crucial because it allowed the large number of international students at Tsinghua University, who were unable to return to classrooms due to the pandemic, to attend lessons. Classes were made available online, and even a smartphone app was developed to allow students to access video recordings of lectures.

The pandemic crisis was therefore used as an opportunity to change the approach to teaching. In the transition to online classes, an important role was played by the integration of teaching materials with MOOCs, which made it possible to access large repositories of materials already available online. Thousands of courses at Tsinghua University and Peking University integrated MOOCs, SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses), recorded lectures, live-streamed courses, and video conferences. As early as the end of January 2020, XuetangX, one of the world’s leading MOOC platforms, made over 1,600 credit-eligible courses publicly available free of charge for universities. Other Chinese platforms, such as iCourse, followed the same path, with online courses used by more than 500,000 teachers and 9 million students between February and April 2020. Altogether, we are talking about hundreds of millions of students who took advantage of tens of thousands of online courses of various kinds.