A Decade of MOOCs and Beyond: Platforms, Policies, Pedagogy, Technology, and Ecosystems with an Emphasis on Greater China

This book is an academic publication about the global development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and major MOOC platforms worldwide in the past decade, as well as the outlook of MOOCs in the future, with an emphasis on Greater China. The book also discusses the upsurge of the demand for online learning and MOOCs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The book is divided into three main parts - Part I: Overview of MOOCs introduces the origin and history of MOOCs and the development of MOOC platforms in Greater China and the global context; Part II: Key Issues discuss the MOOC policies, innovative pedagogy, technology, and ecosystems worldwide; and Part III: Beyond MOOCs probes into the roles and benefits of MOOCs in times of crises, as well as the outlook of MOOCs in the future.

In terms of topic diversity, the book contains a comprehensive investigation of the past and latest MOOC developments, extracting and elaborating on relevant information regarding platforms, policies, pedagogy, technology, and ecosystems. Subsequently, in-depth analyses of MOOC data are utilized to deduce the current trends related to the MOOC movement and to extrapolate the likeliest direction of development for MOOCs in the years to come. The book can inform policymakers, education institutions, course instructors, platform developers, investors, researchers, and individual learners of MOOCs about critical information on the present and future of MOOC development, assisting them in making crucial decisions on what initiatives can optimize their advantages in the sector.

About the Author

Prof. Irwin King is the Director of the Centre for eLearning Innovation and Technology (ELITE) and Chair of the Computer Science & Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has been an evangelist in the use of education technologies in eLearning for the betterment of teaching and learning. His research interests include machine learning, social computing, AI, web intelligence, data mining, and multimedia information processing. In these research areas, he has over 300 technical publications in journals and conferences. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Neural Networks (NN). He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member, and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute of Engineers (HKIE). He is the recipient of the ACM CIKM2019 Test of Time Award, the ACM SIGIR 2020 Test of Time Award, the ACM WSDM 2022 Test of Time Award, and the 2020 APNNS Outstanding Achievement Award for his contributions to social computing with machine learning. He received his B.Sc. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles.

Prof. Wei-I Lee was the first advocator of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement in Taiwan in 2006. Under his promotion, Taiwanese universities have offered more than 2000 OCWs with full course videos, attracting more than 200,000 unique users every month. In 2013, under the direction of Prof. Lee, National Chiao Tung University (now National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) launched the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform, “ewant,” in Taiwan. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Open Education Consortium, OEC, from 2012 to 2014 and is now the Director of Research Center of Higher Educational Resources for Openness (Research Center of HERO) at National Chiao Tung University. Due to his contribution to international open education communities, he was awarded the Open Education Leadership Award of Excellence in 2016 by OEC. In 2017, Prof. Lee initiated Sharing Education Taiwan (SET) movement. Besides being a strong advocator of online learning, Prof. Lee has also utilized online teaching and flip-classroom technique in his own undergraduate and graduate courses since 2007.