Trends and Future Prospects in MOOC Researches: A Systematic Literature Review 2013–2020

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.

Massive open online course adoption amongst newly graduated health care providers

“…Evidence on MOOCs is diverse and rapidly expanding, but stronger methodological approaches and more evidence is required (Longhini et al, 2021 ; Meet & Kala, 2021 ). Despite the fact that MOOC adoption has been increasingly considered within the literature in the past six years (Reich & Ruipérez-Valiente, 2019 ), approaches to increase rates of MOOC adoption are still poorly understood and this has been identified as an emerging research agenda for educational scholars (Meet & Kala, 2021 ). It is acknowledged that MOOCs are not likely to replace higher education but are unlikely to become obsolete, despite low levels of adoption (Reich & Ruipérez-Valiente, 2019 ).…”

“…This paradigm has caused an influx of research on MOOCs, with over two thirds of this evidence base dedicated to understanding learner behaviour and MOOC adoption (Meet & Kala, 2021 ). Successful MOOC adoption has been linked to leaners’ perceived usefulness and performance-to-cost value, while barriers have been identified as insufficient time, poor instruction, difficulty with subject matter, lack of internet accessibility and under challenging assignments (Gütl et al, 2014 ; Ma & Lee, 2019 , 2020 ).…”

Faculty experience and digital platforms in education

“…On the other hand, studies on MOOC have focused on drop-out, completion and retention of students as well as on the North American scenario (Rasheed, Kamsin, Abdullah, Zakari, & Haruna, 2019). Moreover, Meet and Kala (2021) suggest studying the faculty perception on MOOCs as a source of insights for developers and executors of educational policies.…”

The developing pedagogical and psychological trends and MOOCs: A Systematic Review

“…The Internet had a revolutionary effect on the field of education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are considered online education platforms evolving using scalable educational technology (Meet & Kala, 2021). They are free online courses for students to attend in learning environments via the Internet (Karnouskos, 2017).…”