MOOC's

Massive

It should allow access to a very large number of students, much larger than a face-to-face class, or a traditional online course. In addition, the course should be prepared to accept changes in the number of students in several orders of magnitude, for example, going from 1,000 to 100,000 students, without a major problem for operation.

Online

The course is done remotely via the Internet and does not require physical attendance at a classroom. This feature is essential for anyone from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection can participate in these courses.

Open

Open has several meanings in MOOCs. On one hand, the course should be open to everyone and should not require some prerequisites such as possession of a qualification or a level of performance in earlier studies. On the other hand, the access to educational resources (videos, lecture notes) should be free (but other things, like being able to ask direct questions to the teacher, the correction of the activities, or obtaining a certificate at the end of the course may have an economic cost). .Open. is also often interpreted as it does not make use of a closed learning platform, but educational resources are hosted in different places like websites, blogs, wikis, or multimedia repositories. Finally, "open" is also often interpreted as the course makes extensive use of open content, and in turn, content generated by the course is also published open so it can be reused by others. This latter interpretation of "open" is the least fulfilled nowadays, as the most successful MOOCs are organized by companies, such as Coursera or Udacity, who have little interest in sharing their courses open.

Course

It should have some learning objectives to be achieved by students after certain activities within in a given period of time (therefore, it should have a beginning and an end). In addition, it should have some quizzes and exams to assess the knowledge acquired by students. And there should be some kind of interaction between students and teachers in every possible way (student-student and student-teacher).