ABSTRACT
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been around for some time, but several studies highlighted different issues associated with them, including quality. The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed their second blooming, where MOOCs have seen a surge in enrollments since March 2020. This study intended to explore how this enrollment reflected on the research studies included in scientific publications, indexed by Web of Science. Specifically, the bibliometric mapping analyses of 108 studies have revealed an ongoing trend in the countries contributing to the MOOCs research, namely USA, China, UK and Spain. Additionally, MOOCs research coming from US, UK and other western countries was decreasing before the pandemic and showed a continuous dramatic reduction also during the COVID-19 pandemic. Growing attention in MOOCs research among less represented countries was also observed. Besides, most of the topics focused on by MOOCs research during the pandemic were mainly related to education and engineering. © 2022. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
Universities are pressed to update their educational processes in face of the changing students' needs, the companies and industries requirements and the surrounding society evolving context. Never has this challenge been so dramatic and so immediate as it is now, in this COVID-19 pandemic! Much of the burden to adapt the teaching processes and the learning methodologies has fallen onto teachers that were required to improve their pedagogical and technical competences to be able to handle the present societal needs. Teachers must now be able to blend online activities with face-to-face teaching and to reuse existing open contents into their teaching practices to adapt efficiently to this new reality. This paper analyses and discusses the needs of teachers in such contexts, namely when Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are blended with other forms of learning. This study was conceived and designed before the current pandemic but it has been rendered even more relevant by this situation. © 2020 IEEE.