Participation of Latin America in MOOCs: Exploring Trends Across Providers

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become popular in various regions of the world through the years. Since 2008, this phenomenon has received plenty of attention from higher education and universities across countries began to produce these courses. The countries of Europe and the United States are the world’s leading producers of MOOCs and research studies reporting on this topic. This previous research has focused on (1) analysing data from global providers such as edX, Coursera or FutureLearn; (2) describing learners’ characteristics from a small sample of courses in these regions; and (3) offering overviews of courses and platforms. However, research in other regions such as Latin America or Africa are very scarce. As a consequence, little is known about local initiatives in Latin America region, and about the needs and characteristics of its learners. Moreover, this has generated an unequal and biased perspective of what we know today about MOOC learners. To close this inequality gap, this work, presents a cross-platform exploratory study in Latin America, using data from more than three million learners and seven different MOOC providers to generate a joint comparable analysis about students’ characteristics in this region with others regions in the world. Preliminary results report on the differences and similarities of trends based on level of education, age, gender of students, their level of activity and performance of learners in Latin America through the different providers of MOOCs. These results help us understand the MOOC ecosystem in Latin America and report results to the entire community, while at the same time calling for more large-scale studies between researchers and institutions.