Massive open online courses -the modern concept in education and learning

The history of implementing various informational technologies in education began more than 50 years ago. This area started developing intensively with appearance of first personal computers in the beginning of 80-ies of the XX century. The first teaching systems were intended for testing, and were presented in a textual form and later - in a more illustrative graphical form. Computer networks, especially Internet has played the important role in development of the electronic education. A new concept of presenting tutorials accessible to remote students was developed and formulated during the last two decades; it is called Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The plurality of existing MOOCs not only form a reach collection of lectures, practical lessons, tests, computer records of various natural phenomena as well as demonstrations of processes held in a laboratory; MOOCs also open a plenty of new options to organize the educational process in the ways which were impossible in comparison with regular educational materials. Some of the MOOCs implement ideas of "connectivism", i.e. the ideas of organizing the educational activity in the frame of a multidisciplinary environment, with interaction between the students. Examples of modern MOOCs, among others, are: Coursera, edX, FutureLearn, Udacity, KhanAcademy. Presently, MOOCs are created and used in universities and other educational institutions of 33 countries. Categories of courses presented in various sets of MOOCs, include a great number educational directions such as: humanities, physics, mathematics, natural sciences and various technology, social sciences, medicine, art, etc. The duration of courses varies; it may be from one week to one year. For each course, the planned working schedule is indicated, for example from 1 to 20 hours a week. Specific educational institutions or groups of such institutions may serve organizational platforms of MOOCs, by developing and publishing new MOOCs. Presently, we know about 36 such collectives, for example: Canvas.net, edX, FutureLearn, iversity, Miriada X, Open2Study, Saylor.org, Coursera, Udacity. The total number of МООСs approaches to one thousand. For implementing projects of open education, a great number (more than 150) of software platforms have been developed. Such systems as: Moodle, WebCT, Docebo, Claroline, Desire2Learn can be considered as the most popular and recognized among the customers. Such universal software platforms comprise tools enabling the designers to represent the tutorials in a user-friendly form, to conduct automatic assessment, to create and monitor students' databases, their educational activities and achievements, to develop a web-site for communication between the students, for example for mutual testing their home-works. One characteristic feature of most of the platforms is existence of an initial open-code, which allows adding some new functionality features to the software system by different designers. The workstation of any student is any computer with a Web browser and the Internet access. Coursera platform is widely known in the MOOCs market. Coursera defines itself as an educational company suggesting free online courses to any customer. More than 100 leading universities and other well-known educational institutions have become partners of Coursera and have thereby obtained a possibility to teach millions of students. The software platform of Coursera is a proprietary product of Coursera's own research and development. Among other advantages, it allows preserving all statistical information about students and their activities in a common data base, and further using that information for analysis and refinement of the educational process. At the end of the course, provided that the home-works, projects and the examinations are successfully completed, the student may ask, pay for, and obtain the graduation certificate. Coursera is capable of teaching up to 50 thousand people simultaneously on each of the courses. By the time of preparing this review, the total number of students registered for the Coursera courses reached 6 266 870. However, it is usual that only 5-10% of the registered students obtain their certificates. During the last years, development of MOOCs goes in the direction of more and more detailed organization of the educational activity and essentially increases the number of new suggested courses. In order to classify different MOOCs, the following specific labels are proposed: cMOOC for courses based on the ideas of connectivism, and xMOOC for some specific courses intended for very wide circles of students. Appearance of MOOCs opened for scientists a broad field of analysis and scientific research related to online education. The topics related to the self-learning ability and process, and to assessment of the learning activity results are presently the most discussed ones. They discussions refer to types and formats of home works, to methods of testing, to assessment of answers given in the free format (such as essays, referred texts), etc. The paper comprises an analysis of the technologies for testing and assessment of the learning activity of students, which are implemented in COURSERA. Based on the implementation of mixed diagnostic tests, new solutions of the assessment task are proposed.

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