The view of MOOC researches in Iran and the world

The new changes and approaches created by Covid 19 and the rapid movement into the digital world in education have led to the development of technological skills and self-directed learning for students. This has led to the use of new learning models using technologies such as MOOCs (massive open online courses). Optimal utilization of MOOC facilities requires review of the latest research conducted inside and outside the country. Given the dispersion of these studies, their integration and aggregation in a comprehensive framework and the study of research priorities of each group seems necessary. A review of the research literature indicates that the number of meta-analyses conducted in the field of MOOC is limited and the studies were mostly conducted several years ago. Therefore, considering the speed of growth of this technology, especially in recent years, this research tries to collect and present useful information from new studies in this field in Iran and the world for the development of researchers' perspectives. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to outline the image of MOOC field research at the local and global scale.

This research is applied in terms of purpose, descriptive in terms of data collection method and qualitative/quantitative in terms of nature of the data. The method of data collection is to examine documentary studies by electronic search of articles available on the Internet and extracting their files. The research method was meta-analysis in accordance with the Rathe and Schell model and the statistical population of the research is all local and foreign doctoral dissertations and scientific research articles in the field of MOOC, which were indexed in Irandoc, Gigalib, Magiran, SID, Springer and Science Direct site, and also, the articles to which access was provided through the Google Scholar search engine. The statistical sample included 6 doctoral dissertations and 42 foreign papers in English and 5 doctoral dissertations and 18 local papers, a total of 69 local and foreign studies that were selected via purposive sampling. The input criteria of the studies were related to the subject of MOOC, electronic publication, publication in the last five years and publication in databases and authoritative journals, which among them, the studies that were carried out from a technical point of view in the field of MOOC or have been not scientifically valid or access to their full text was not possible, were excluded from the statistical sample. The selected studies were entered into Max QDA software for content analysis and were divided into two groups of internal and external categories, and then were categorized based on the year of publication to remove duplicate articles and to compare and review articles more closely. After that, the content of each article was carefully reviewed and the important contents of each article such as title, keywords, type of MOOC were discussed. The educational level of MOOC content in these researches was coded using descriptive statistics and comparison of data in two categories of local and foreign research were conducted.  

The findings of this study indicate that in general, the literature of MOOC in Iran and the world is mainly concerned with the following themes: the effectiveness of MOOC, Developing an educational design model for MOOCs, Challenges and solutions in MOOCs, Factors influencing the focus and analysis of research. In addition, in Iranian studies, in comparison with the international ones, the issues of interaction in MOOCs, hybrid MOOCs and student MOOCs have been very limited and insignificant.

The lack of technical preparation and internet infrastructure and the lack of technological literacy among the students and the lack of attention to the necessity of interaction can be the possible reasons underlying lack of sufficient attention to hybrid and student MOOCs, but with the restrictions of Corona virus and forced shift of education to virtual space, they have relatively improved and their necessity has been highlighted. Therefore, with regard to the findings of the current research, regarding the importance of interaction, hybrid MOOCs and student MOOCs in foreign research, in order to make more use of the possibilities of MOOCs, it is necessary to pay attention to these topics in Iran as well.