COMERCIO INTERNACIONAL: MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES

Massive Open Online Courses

The Massive Open Online Courses, better known as "MOOC", available through the four main providers platforms currently: Coursera, EdX, Miríada X and Udacity. These courses nowadays pose many unknowns that will be treated in the research, such as the conceptual foundation of the same ones and the free access to the superior education of quality, new forms of generating and sharing the knowledge, the business model that underlies to This phenomenon of unprecedented expansion, the problems and challenges facing the future and, in more detail, the global offer of courses to date. These aspects are the main topics of study.

The chosen theme is justified in the need to analyze from a critical perspective the current offer of MOOC courses, establishing for this purpose a theoretical and conceptual framework to approach postures and to better understand how the phenomenon has been understood by the different authors who have Theme to the present. In addition, the scarcity of specific data available to evaluate the results obtained after the experiences after the launch of these courses through these platforms increases the need for reliable and useful information for the global assessment of the phenomenon. To date, no analysis of these characteristics has been published or is available in any medium on the offer of MOOC worldwide with data extracted from the organizations themselves,

The EdX platform also took its first steps in that fruitful year of 2011. In this case was not the result of the private initiative of several individuals, but of the sharing of two parallel projects of two prestigious universities in the United States; The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as the MIT, and Harvard University. MIT has always been committed to open quality training and pioneered initiatives such as the Open Course Ware since the early 2000s and the success of the MOOC model launched the MITx platform in 2011 to offer quality courses Free of his institution, model by which Harvard also chose to create HarvardX. In mid-2012 both platforms are merged creating EdX,

Until well into 2012 the MOOC provider platforms seemed to be almost under the hegemony of the American academic field, at the end of 2012 the first initiative of magnitude alien to the North American context appeared, precisely in Spain, when Telefónica Learning Services and Universia launched Miríada X With the objective of offering MOOCs taught by Ibero-American universities of the Universia network. It started to work in early 2013 and, for the moment, seems to be getting very good results from participation.

It is still early and we still do not have enough information to assess the phenomenon in a global way, but the speed with which the MOOCs taught through these large platforms are being expanded is indisputable. Time will tell if we are facing a real revolution in the world of teaching and free access to knowledge or, conversely, a passing fashion.