MOOCs: A comprehensive study to highlight its strengths and weaknesses

Abstract

With the dawn of the information age, knowledge discovery and exchange is increasing exponentially every day and a new paradigm in education has emerged which is the Massive open online courses or MOOCs. Our research aims at exploring the fundamentals that gives MOOCs an edge over the traditional courses and highlights the weakness of MOOCs over traditional courses. In our study we present a statistical analysis of the hypotheses developed to understand the fundamentals of MOOCs and reasons for the huge dropout rates. Based on these empirical evidences we also propose ways to decrease the attrition rates.