Abstract:

The growing role of the distance education in recent years determines the interest of researchers towards this topic. The development of information technologies in the field of education has led to the emergence of many new phenomena in educational and pedagogical practice. The massive open online course is one of the most arguable and important of them.

The article examines the differences between traditional distant courses and MOOCs as well as the evolution and particularities of MOOCs in the Russian Federation.

Analyzing Russian and foreign MOOCs platforms such as Udacity, Coursera, Futurelearn, Duolingo, Lektorium, Universarium, LinguaLeo, Stepik and other the authors offer a set of solutions allowing to overcome the barriers and bias towards the implementation of online education in Russian Universities and to increase the motivation of students and lecturers to achieve greater efficiency of massive open online courses.

The authors implement the comparative analysis and other empiric methods of quantitative estimation.

The publication has been prepared with the support of the RUDN University Program 5-100.

Keywords:

Massive open online course, educational technology, distance education, technology in learning.