
Sinergias educativas
April - June Vol. 6 - 2 2021
http://sinergiaseducativas.mx/index.php/revista/
The positive impact of MOOC courses is that most of them are
created by prestigious universities around the world, they are free
with the option of paying a fee if you want to get the diploma or
certification, although a good number of educational and non-
educational institutions, MOOCs and Webinars are free including
the certificate as is the case in Ecuador the Universidad Particular de
Loja.
According to (Nicholls, 2020), a writer for Infobae Magazine,
"The most prestigious universities in the world offer 1,686
free courses to cope with the quarantine, institutions such as
Harvard, MIT or Stanford offer online training at no cost.
Among them, there are classes in Spanish. Business, Big
Data, science, marketing, human resources, communication,
languages and even how to create your own app".
MOOC courses, on the other hand, allow us to study and learn at our
own pace, and certain trainings can be started at any time, others do
have a start date. The objective of this mode of education is that they
are flexible to manage our time, we can study day or night or at any
time, according to our needs. Given the health crisis that we are
experiencing worldwide due to COVID-19, some online course
platforms such as Miríada, Coursera, Udacity and edX, have
expanded their offerings of free courses so that we can take
advantage of this quarantine to train and continue learning.
Not all that glitters is gold, everything seemed a wonder until a
reality presents itself, MOOCs courses, are a business for the
institutions that sponsor them and have become a new way to make
money for most of them, to cite a model of the UK scientist Marcus
Hurst, has made several disputes making it clear that scientists do
not charge a penny for all studies funded by the taxpayer to be
accessible on the web for free, According to Hurst (2012). "A course
at Stanford can cost in the neighborhood of $40,000 not counting
cost of living. If we put on average that that course consists of 200
students, in total, that's about $8 million. If we transfer this figure to
open education, if $50 is charged as a kind of fee to each of the
200,000 students taking a hypothetical course, it would raise $10
million. A fee that can be adjusted to the income of the students."