The role of massive open online courses during the COVID-19 era

Abstract

The process of developing education is a vital and important issue around the world as it is an issue that is inherited through time, and it is one of the most important challenges facing the world. Distance education is one of the means of developing education through which knowledge can be spread and which can help people to overcome obstacles of time and space. Recently, teaching and learning systems have become completely dependent on e-learning, especially during the corona virus disease (COVID-19) pandemic since the world has turned to electronic transactions in all areas, especially in education, and the most used technology includes the use of online training courses such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). It provides great support to the distance learning process as it can facilitate the learning process by diversifying its contents via media, such as text and video. In addition, MOOCs are the most popular and effective online courses. The aim of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of the definition, characteristics and patterns of MOOCs. Also, this paper discusses the specific advantages and disadvantages of taking up MOOCs along with the different challenges that MOOCs are facing. In addition, various suggestions will be given to make improvements that can help in making process enhancements to MOOCs. Finally, this paper presents the importance of MOOCs in the COVID-19 era. We hope this paper will help instructors to understand how MOOCs can be made more efficient, enable learners to become more organised and increase their understanding of MOOCs, and will help education development system specialists to find suitable solutions for problems that MOOCs are facing. Keywords: Massive open online courses, e-learning, online courses, distance education, COVID-19.