MOOC

plural MOOCs

1. abbreviationacronymAcronym of massive open online course; a course designed for a very large enrollment, offered on the World Wide Web by an educational institution and typically free of charge.

   In some ways, how learning and sharing works in a MOOC is more akin to a social network than to a traditional classroom.

   2011 August 4, Audrey Watters, “Are MOOCs the Future of Online Learning?”, in KQED.org, archived from the original on 11 May 2013, retrieved 17 Jan 2013

   4 more examples

   Besides the Artificial Intelligence course, Stanford offered two other MOOCs last semester — Machine Learning (104,000 registered, and 13,000 completed the course), and Introduction to Databases (92,000 registered, 7,000 completed).

   2012 March 4, Tamar Lewin, “Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 10 Oct 2020, retrieved 17 Jan 2013

   With MOOCs offered by the most renowned professors in their respective fields, students have less incentive to relocate for postsecondary education.

   2013 January 16, Anita Singh, Howard Adelman, “How open courses are changing the modern university”, in University Affairs, Canada, archived from the original on 22 Jan 2013, retrieved 17 Jan 2013

   Besides providing online courses to their own (generally fee-paying) students, universities have felt obliged to join the MOOC revolution to avoid being guillotined by it. […] Led by the Open University, which pioneered distance-learning in the 1970s, FutureLearn, a consortium of 21 British, one Irish and one Australian university, plus other educational bodies, will start offering MOOCs later this year.

   2013 July 20, “The attack of the MOOCs”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845, archived from the original on 04 Apr 2021

   For college-level open learning, there are a number of platforms that provide massive online open courses (MOOCs) designed to harness the capacity of universities and individual instructors to offer distance education free or at low cost to anyone interested in a subject who did not need the academic credential of a university.

   2022, Jon M. Garon, Parenting for the Digital Generation, page 61