Study of consumer buying behaviour in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Abstract

MOOCs were started in the year 2008 and the first course that was offered was ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’. This course was created by George Seimens. The main aim of MOOCs was to provide education for leisure and it basically aimed at enriching the knowledge of people in their spare time through good courses. There are currently around 1200+ courses offered by 1300+ instructors across all the MOOCs websites. Some of the major sites where MOOCs are offered are EdX, Coursera, OpenLearning, Complexity Explorer, Canvas Network, NovoEd, MongoDB, Udacity, MiriadaX, CourseSites and France Universities Numerique. As of 2014, EdX had 27 registered universities and Coursera had 108 registered universities. While most of these offered courses were in English, there were a number of courses offered in other languages including Spanish, German, Mandarin, French and Arabic. A course typically had a duration of 8- 10 weeks. The segments that are broadly covered by these courses include: Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Math & Stats, Education & Teaching, Health & Medicine, Business & Management and Computer Science & Programming.