Factors influencing the sustainability of MOOCs compared with traditional distance education courses

Abstract

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Informatics and e-learning (IIE), have offered distance education courses for more than twenty years. In the years 2014–2016 we tried out a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) model for course delivery. We compared the two models of delivering the courses. A total of thirty success factors for sustainability were used to evaluate the Distance Education in three time frames and the new MOOC package. The result indicates that sustainability can be achieved if institutions are willing or able to implement more flexibility in organising their course packages.