Massive Open Online Courses

From an information systems research perspective, MOOCs represent an innovative, web-based business model for financing, designing, and provisioning educational services. Due to the increasing digitization and respective structuring of these services, the laws of the Internet economy Shapiro and Varian 1999; marginal costs of additional participants tend towards zero, occurrence of network and long-tail effects) open up higher education and vocational training to the masses. Thus, MOOCs offer great potential (e.g., increased effectiveness and eefficiencyin education) and challenges (e.g., new competitors) for academic institutions and other providers of educational services. The current academic discussion on MOOCs focuses on the different types of MOOCs the involved didactic concepts, as well as the technology and mechanisms that facilitate the scaling of educational services.