Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Seite 10

2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This Literature review has been undertaken to specifically indicate the breadth of
discussion around this immature topic with a focus on impact on education for
universities. It has been necessary to include Articles, journals and blog posts to
provide a comprehensive and contemporary illustration of the impact that MOOCs
have had and are having on Higher Education.

2.1 CONTEXT
Online learning is nothing new. In the UK, the Open University has been offering
distance learning courses since 1969 becoming distance learning via the internet in
1988, a natural progression for the ‘University of the Air’ (Open University). In the
last decade or so, offering course content online has been available from MIT and
Berkeley, with their Open Courseware initiative (Carson, 2009). This allowed the
sharing of high quality university level courses, although they were not necessarily
run as courses the content was available for anyone to use. In the last few years
however, the technology has come together (Hyman, 2012) and something new has
happened. Online education has become interactive in the form of Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs) (Audsley, Fernando, Maxson, Robinson & Varney, 2013)
available to anyone interested in learning from world class institutions, in a format
similar to an on campus class, all for free.
“A MOOC brings together people interested in learning (or “students”) and an
expert or experts who seek to facilitate the learning” (Liyanagunawardena, Adams,
& Williams, 2013).
Millions of ‘learners’ have participated in online courses just because they have
access to a device, and a adequate network that they can use to connect with
(Koller, 2012b).
MOOCs have hit the headlines and have caused rousing discussions and debates
about the future of Higher Education, in the US, the UK and around the world (Vardi,
2012). However, this concept of providing free high quality education to the masses
has been criticized, as a myth (Bates, 2012). This has been born out in part by the
data, the majority of MOOC learners are highly educated and many come from
education sectors (MOOCS @ Edinburgh Group, 2013).

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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