MOOCs in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges

摘要

In the modern era of Information Age, higher education has been gradually transferred from the activities based on individual experiences to a systemic and complicated project with the large amount of information and its own team. MOOCs are the outcome of the current times, which have injected new vitality to higher education and driven its reform. Compared with the traditional teaching, MOOCs bear the outstanding features of free and open registration, an open curriculum, and open-ended outcomes, which make its wide popularity around the world. MOOCs have brought in golden opportunities for learners to access high quality courses more easily and for instructors to present their teaching capability on a larger platform. At the same time, MOOCs are faced with challenges such as the high rate of dropout compared with the high rate of enrollment, and the lack of effective evaluation system. The further development of MOOCs lies in the blended teaching combining the traditional classroom teaching and online teaching, the relationship between which is complementary.