Towards MOOCs and Their Role in Engineering Education

Sajid Iqbal Ph.D student Harbin Institute of Technology

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MOOCs became famous, when in the fall of 2011, a professor of Stanford University conducted a course on Artificial Intelligence. Enrollment quickly reached 160,000 students from 190 countries; only 23,000 finished it. Since 2012, MOOCs got attention of the universities, media and entrepreneurs.

2012: Times year of the MOOC

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According to IEEE CS 2022 report, with nanotechnology and quantum computing, MOOCs are amongst top ten technologies that could change the world by 2022.

Oxford online dictionary added the acronym MOOC as, “ a course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people”. MOOCs have generated a paradigm shift in online education by presenting free high-quality education to anyone, anywhere with Internet access.

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The advent of MOOCs may seem abrupt, but they are the next stage in the development of Open Educational Resources (OERs).

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Initially, there was a lot of hype and no one was quite sure what impact MOOCs will have on the future of education.

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Each new instrument: blackboard, radio, motion picture and television, was labeled the most important advancement since Gutenberg’s printing press.

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But from the start of new millennium, it has been claimed that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) aids could revolutionize education because they absorb all these earlier innovations.

Some MOOC platforms are:

Google Course Builder

OER University

Class2Go

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Engineering education is the activity of teaching knowledge and principles related to the professional practice of engineering.

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Since engineering courses require prerequisites like linear algebra, calculus, programming so in the beginning upper-level engineering courses were virtually absent from the MOOC list, but the situation is changing.

For MOOCs, virtual and remote labs can help.

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The laboratories are a unique part of engineering education.

There is gradual rise in the online courses of science subjects.

Data collected from Nov 2014 to May 2015.

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This sustained increase in the science MOOCs and the introductory level engineering MOOCs will bring in more upper level engineering MOOCs in future.

Table I presents the MOOCs offered by Coursera. These courses are not mutually exclusive. Some courses appear under different headings. We have divided MOOCs into six major categories as:

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Similarly, edX MOOCs have been segregated into six broad groups. edX online courses are shown in Table II.

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Breakdown of Coursera MOOCs

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Breakdown of edX massive online courses

Some issues in engineering MOOCs are:

Laboratory Requirements Evaluation Completion

Rates

Accreditation Plagiarism Pedagogy

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MOOCs can be used as prerequisites and introductory engineering courses.

They can also complement continuing professional education (CPD) and certification preparation. 16

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