| The first Massive Open Online Coursers (MOOCs) was established in Canada in 2008, then it has developed rapidly with the characteristics of simple, cheap and good quality. It has also challenged the traditional higher education. Although the MOOC was established in Canada, it developed faster in the U.S. and England afterwards. The New York Times even named 2012 as the "the year of MOOC for America". However, because MOOC is still new to most of us, and in order to know MOOC closely as well as to gain enlightenment and draw lessons from America’s experience for developing our own MOOC, this paper will study on the status of American MOOC and the challenges it is facing now as well as strategies people have tried.Section one studies on three motivations of MOOC. And research on its status from four aspects, including scale, main participants, three most influential MOOC platforms and social recognition. It also makes a conclusion of MOOC’s advantages and disadvantages.Section two studies on the case of Vanderbilt University’s MOOC from three aspects:development, management and evaluation.Section three and four focus on analyzing three challenges American MOOC is facing now as well as strategies:the first challenge is quality and completion rate. Despite the massive numbers, students who have completed the course are only very small part of it. At the same time, cheating problem has turned up. All of these problems have brought people’s doubt about MOOC’s utility and quality. However, there are many reasons for the low completion rate, and we can not take a part for the whole. Some experts think that MOOC has attracted far more people than traditional higher education, and this is already a big success; The second challenge is test and credit. Whether MOOC can get credit for degree is very critical for MOOC’s development in the future. Up to now, there are some universities have already tried to give MOOC credits, but whether MOOC has reached the standard is still need to be considered; The third challenge is the cost and profit. With the growing of MOOC, making profit has drawn public attention. No matter seen from balancing cost for schools or the original investment intention for companies, making profit is inevitable in MOOC’s development. This paper will deeply analyze American MOOC’s profit problem. Nowadays, American MOOC has already figured out many profit models, which mainly depends on charging service so that it can also take public welfare of education into account. Making profit is a trend for MOOC, but the conflict between making profit and the instinct of education will be a hot spot in MOOC’s practice and research.In the last section of the paper introduces Chinese MOOC’s development and participation status. During the research, we found that there are still a lot of problems in Chinese MOOC, such as the quality of online education of each online institutions, the government and universities is not good enough; students have not developed a habit of online interaction after class; being lack of learning styles, etc. On the basis of these drawbacks, we made a conclusion that China has not established a mature and completely open MOOC platform yet. Combining with the experience of American MOOC, this paper will put forward 5 suggestions, including that gain more support from the government, cooperate in multi-ways, collect fund broadly, share education resources between universities, promote knowledge creation and share, and combine both online and off-line education. |
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