Abstract:

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Informatics and e-learning (IIE), have organised distance education courses for more than twenty years. In total more than 70 courses have been offered and up to 6000 participants have taken the courses each semester. Up to 800 participants have been enrolled on a single course at one time.

In the years 2014 - 2016 we have tried out a new model offering online courses. The new courses have been developed, organised, delivered and assessed quite differently than the former courses, using a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) model.

In this paper we have compared the two models of delivering the courses. A total of thirty success factors for sustainability have been used to evaluate the Distance Education in three time frames and the new MOOC offers. The result shows that sustainability can be achieved if the institutions are willing or able to implement more flexibility in organising their offers.

Keywords:

Distance learning, MOOC, Business models.