The rise of MOOCs: The literature review of research progress and hot spots of MOOCs education in mainland China

Abstract

With the development of information technology, knowledge acquisition is not just limited to the traditional classroom. As a rising educational method, "Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)" has attracted extensive attention by educational circles. Taking 445 pieces of journal articles about educational study of MOOCs included in China Academic Journal Network Publishing database (CAJD) from 2013 to 2016 as samples, this study adopts bibliometric analysis method and visual knowledge network analysis tool CiteSpace to carry out in-depth exploration of aspects such as development status, developing trend, and hot subjects of educational study of MOOCs. The study discovers that the quantity of the articles about educational study of MOOCs presents a rising trend as a whole in the past four years. Highly cited articles mainly concentrate on pedagogy. A small part of articles focus on fields like library and information and computer science. The evolution course of study has experienced the process of "introduction-development-deepening" and its hot subjects include reflection on teaching practice, modern teaching means and existing problems and reform path. On this basis, the shortcomings of the existing researches are pointed out.