MOOCs: between innovation and the essence of higher education

Abstract

MOOCs as massive open online courses, have been one of the main issue in the Academic debate. Since their creation and identification, they create hype of interest both for their potentials as a disruptive innovation in the education field, and for their unclear DNA, which have created a huge debate among the IT and Academics’ community. Nowadays, after 4 years since the years of MOOCs, as the New York Times stated, these technologies have revealed their real potential, especially through the huge amount of data collected from the top players of this game. From MOOCs, we have learnt a lot thanks to their diffusion around the word and their initial seism among the traditional education ecosphere that flamed a great academic debate. We have learnt that MOOCs are not a threat for the offline Universities but a useful support, which could really enhance the learning experience, aspect that we have analysed in order to use this technology for its real potential. Therefore, MOOCs are still alive, they did not disrupt the traditional education but, as we are going to see in this thesis, they will have an important part in the improvement of the learning experience, in the globalization and democratization of the education.