The Role of MOOC Courses in the Development of Polytechnic Education

Abstract

The research objective is to analyze the contemporary Russian platforms for massive online education, which provide the opportunity to master skills and obtain knowledge in compliance with the conception of polytechnic education: Open Education, Universarium, Lektorium, and Intuit. The research method is comparative analysis by criteria-number of visitors, area of training, target group, content specificity, including interaction means, systems of certification of the acquired knowledge. The authors come to the conclusion that most of the courses offered by the Universarium platform are aimed at schoolchildren, university entrants, and teachers. Open Education specializes in elaborating courses in compliance with federal state educational standards. Intuit specializes in IT sphere and provides additional education issuing documents of established form. Lektorium has significantly increased traffic since 2017, offering high quality content from the leading educational, commercial, and public organizations. An important characteristic common for all the studied platforms is a large variety of courses and educational programs, including those aimed at developing supradisciplinary universal soft skills, and elaboration and publication of MOOCs for various target groups.

The role of massive open online courses during the COVID-19 era

“…At the end of March, Coursera (Lund & Zukerfeld, 2020), the most powerful MOOC provider, presented that they are providing more than 100 free courses via the Internet to be useful in this time until May (Coursera, 2020). Lately, it has increased the total number of courses to 140 in July (Galimullina, Korshunova & Feoktistova, 2020). The modern courses are taken from Coursera's partners in the Latin American college.…”