MOOCs: A systematic study of the published literature 2008-2012

Since their appearance in 2008, with in a fairly short time, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a 'buzzword'. It was time for the literature to be systematically analyzed to provide an overall picture of the phenomenon. I together with Professor Andrew Adams (Graduate School of Business Administration,  the Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan) and Professor Shirley Williams (School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading, UK) took the challenge to systematically review the literature on MOOCs from 2008-2012.

At the same time we started this work, somewhere in October - November 2012, a call for proposals appeared for MERLOT Special Issue on MOOCs. Our proposal was not successful. Through our literature  search we found that the IRRODL (International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning) had published the highest number of MOOC related research papers during the period 2008-2012 and we were keen to finish our literature study and publish our work with them.

When we finally approached IRRODL with our paper we were delighted to hear that the journal was willing to publish our work. This was an important milestone for me personally because this was my very first full paper accepted for publication in a journal. Given the reputation of IRRODL, it was an awesome news. In July 2013 (just 3 months after we first submitted our paper) it is published and online in IRRODL's volume 14 (3).

Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Adams, A. A., & Williams, S. (2013). MOOCs: a Systematic Study of the Published Literature 2008-2012. International review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(3), 201-227.

In this paper we looked at all published scholarly literature on MOOCs that we could find from: journals, conferences, workshop papers, magazines and reports. Forty-five peer reviewed papers were identified and used as the base for this systematic review.

Because we only used journal papers, workshop papers, conference papers, academic magazines and reports, MOOC related discussions in Blog posts were not captured by this review. We have identified this as a limitation of  study. Blog posts always present difficulties for authors of reviews in determining the credibility of the posts. There are few studies on how researchers use blogs but the transient nature of blogs means that they are difficult to suitably include in a systematic consideration. When the same search terms used to find MOOC related articles for this review was used in Google Web search, it returned over 50,000 items; when used in a Google Blog search resulted in 570 results (December 04, 2012), but we have not analyzed these items in our paper.

Some quantitative highlights from the paper:

The first MOOC related paper was published in 2008, with again just one paper identified in 2009, seven papers in 2010, 10 in 2011, and 26 in 2012.

Looking at articles by the type of publication: the majority of identified articles were published in journals (17 papers), with a smaller number of articles appearing in conference proceedings and magazines (13 and 10 respectively).

Above graph illustrates the separation of articles by publication type and year. From 2009 to 2012 there is a gradual increase of the number of journal articles and conference papers. Notice that the first magazine article about MOOCs appeared in 2011 and the following year there is a fourfold increase!

There is much more qualitative analysis in this paper and I am not discussing it all here spoiling the fun of reading the article itself. You can find the article here.

Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Adams, A. A., & Williams, S. (2013). MOOCs: a Systematic Study of the Published Literature 2008-2012. International review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(3), 201-227.