This article analyses the current usage of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in HEIs. First, a literature review is performed to identify and classify the recent developments in the area and to characterize the most used platforms and courses. Following this, an analysis of MOOCs offered by some HEIs is carried out to characterize and compare…

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), an unconventional method of learning has paved way for educational opportunities for learners of all age groups at any time. However, evidence suggests that MOOC has posed many challenges such as low completion rates, low motivation of learners and low perceived value compared to traditional methods. In MOOC,…

The diversity in reasons that students have for enrolling in massive open online courses (MOOCs) is an often-overlooked aspect while modeling learners' behaviors in MOOCs. Using survey data from 11,202 students in five MOOCs spanning different academic disciplines, this study evaluates the reasons that students enrolled in MOOCs, using an…

Every semester, instructors of general education survey classes in history struggle with the same questions as they rewrite their syllabi: How can I get my students to engage more deeply into writing and research? How can I help them develop their problem solving and critical thinking skills? How can I make history more interesting to non-history…

Digitalisation provides valuable opportunities for learning; however, it imposes demands on teachers. Teachers are expected not only to be profound users of educational technologies but also to engage in the design of digital environments such as online courses, learning management systems, and mobile applications. This article argues that…

As student enrolments grow and student diversity increases in many areas of higher education, faculty face challenges to support and ensure individual student learning and development. At the same time, active and experiential approaches to learning are recognized for their potential to develop autonomy and critical thinking, among other valuable…

Background: Continuous calls for reform in science education emphasize the need to provide science experiences in lower-division courses to improve the retention of STEM majors and to develop science literacy and STEM skills for all students. Open or authentic inquiry and undergraduate research are effective science experiences leading to multiple…

The study aimed to evaluate the 8th grade mathematics curriculum in Turkey, which was revised in 2016-2017 school year, and implemented from 2017-2018 school year on. In the study the Eisner's educational connoisseurship and criticism model was utilized. The participants of the study comprised 15 secondary school mathematics teachers selected by…

Massive open online courses are increasingly popular. One characteristic of most massive open online courses is that they are offering educational contents to masses of different individual learners. At the same time, a particular challenge for the individual learner could be the massiveness of such courses, that is, that one is part of a large…

China has the largest higher education system in the world. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the literature on distance higher education, including MOOCs, development in China, its accompanying practices, challenges, and opportunities. The study also offers recommendations derived from the literature on how to make distance…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) show great potential to transform traditional education through the Internet. However, the high attrition rates in MOOCs have often been cited as a scale-efficacy tradeoff. Traditional educational approaches are usually unable to identify such large-scale number of at-risk students in danger of dropping out in…

The large-scale and granular interaction data collected in online learning platforms such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide unique opportunities to better understand individuals' learning processes and could facilitate the design of personalized and more effective support mechanisms for learners. In this paper, we present two…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) face persistent challenges related to student performance, including high rates of attrition and low student achievement scores. Previous studies that have examined the performance of students in MOOCs have done so using qualitative analysis and the quantitative analysis of small samples. This study is the first…

MOOCs and online courses have notoriously high attrition [1]. One challenge is that it can be difficult to tell if students fail to complete because of disinterest or because of course difficulty. Utilizing a Deep Knowledge Tracing framework, we account for student engagement by including course interaction covariates. With these, we find that we…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are easily accessible for anyone in the world to study any given subject, often for free. However, there is some question as to whether they are comparable to their real-world counterparts. The Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) created by Dang, Coxhead, and Webb (2017) was designed to create a word list that is…