Abstract
Advent of internet has a revolutionary impact on every sector of economy and so is with the education sector, which has witnessed the evolution of online education through scalable educational technology, namely, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The purpose of this paper is to summarize the pool of available knowledge related to MOOCs in the scholarly literature, published during the period 2013–2020. One hundred and two available published studies in peer reviewed journals & conferences searched in major academic databases have been reviewed and presented in the systematic literature review. The findings have been divided under the various research themes of MOOCs including geographical contribution of MOOC studies, citation trends, prominent research themes, theoretical frameworks and methodological rigor in the existing scholarly works. The results demonstrate that most empirical research were conducted by the researchers having affiliation to institutions based out of United States followed by institutions in the developing economies of China and India. The most focused area of research in MOOCs is on MOOC adoption. Limited research has happened on poor MOOC completion status, the instructor-related topics and on democratization of MOOC. Thrust areas of MOOC researches and future research directions are also discussed.
Highlights
Open and online education is regarded as disruptive innovation, which will fuel growth in the education sector and will transform the landscape of secondary and tertiary education systems
Advent of internet has a revolutionary impact on every sector of economy and so is with the education sector, which has witnessed the evolution of online education through scalable educational technology, namely, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
The results demonstrate that most empirical research were conducted by the researchers having affiliation to institutions based out of United States followed by institutions in the developing economies of China and India
Summary
Open and online education is regarded as disruptive innovation, which will fuel growth in the education sector and will transform the landscape of secondary and tertiary education systems. MOOCs are considered to be an excellent medium for promoting lifelong learning that is one of the important objectives of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG4) for Quality Education listed by United Nations and to be achieved by all the member nations by 2030. As MOOC courses are offered free of cost to anybody and everybody staying in any part of the world anytime, it provides access to higher education and beyond for people who cannot afford a formal education and are disadvantaged. In this regard, MOOCs may be considered as contributing to social inclusion by democratization of higher education (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2016). Digitalization is one of the most talked about and promising development in the area of education and MOOC is featured in “Innovation Pedagogy Report 2014” by Open University as among TOP 10 pedagogies that might transform education to an
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