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1. Introduction
Massive open online course (MOOC) is a recent phenomenon in education domain. It is an online course, which can be accessed using a computer or a smart phone. It is typically taken by an adult learner and lasts four to six weeks. As MOOCs are designed for massive enrolment, they depend on videos for information delivery, and quizzes and peer-reviewed assignments for assessment. They offer online discussion forums for interaction among learners and teachers. Majority of MOOCs are offered for free. However, often fees are charged for certification.
MOOC offers many benefits over traditional education model: it can reach a large number of students; provide high-quality course content at low or zero cost; and give unparalleled insights into human learning (Welsh and Dragusin, 2013). Purely from a student perspective, MOOC offers an advantage over traditional lecture-based course due to its greater flexibility, customization, and accessibility, which results into structured self-paced learning (Bruff et al., 2013). In spite of these benefits, MOOC suffers from certain weaknesses, such as difficulty in authoritative assessment of written work utilizing critical thinking skills, reliable authentication for certification of students and inability to provide frequent interaction between faculty and students (Welsh and Dragusin, 2013). MOOCs are also criticized for concentration of their users in the world’s most advanced countries and the low completion rates (Reich and Ruipérez-Valiente, 2019).
MOOC received attention when in 2011 one of the early MOOCs, a MOOC on Artificial Intelligence from Stanford University, attracted 160,000 students from across the globe out of which 23,000 finished the course (Waldrop, 2013). MOOC further gained hype when the New York Times declared 2012 as the Year of MOOC (Pappano, 2012). Since those days, numbers of MOOCs and MOOC users have increased significantly. As reported in January 2019 by a MOOC aggregator, Class Central, 101 million students enrolled in 11,400 courses offered by 900+ Universities in 2018. Though there are many MOOC providers, Coursera, and edX, each having more than 10 million registered users, were reported to be top two MOOC providers. While USA tops the list of countries for the number of MOOC users, the number of MOOC users is rising in countries like India, China and Brazil. Edx, for example, has reported 79 per cent of its...