Vol. 5, Special Issue 4, Part D (2019)

Abstract
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently received a great deal of attention from the media, entrepreneurial vendors, education professionals and technologically literate sections of the public. The promise of MOOCs is that they will provide free to access, cutting edge courses that could drive down the cost of university-level education and potentially disrupt the existing models of higher education (HE). This has encouraged elite universities to put their courses online by setting up open learning platforms, such as edX. New commercial start-ups such as Coursera and Udacity have also been launched in collaboration with prestigious universities, offering online courses for free or charging a small fee for certification that is not part of credit for awards.