Massive Open Online Courses : A New Dawn for Higher Education?

Accessibility has emerged as a fundamental characteristic in the approach and exertion of higher education recently as has its capability to introduce creativity in teaching and learning practices. The emergence of the Internet along with the potentials it offers to allow the publication and distribution of resources, the astonishing evolution in online educational content, and the introduction of open content license for such content have all integrated to generate new means of elaborating and delivering teaching resources and techniques. Recently, a new concept, MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) presented itself as a novel way to exploit and share teaching expertise and learning resources through a global online presence taking advantage of the possibilities that cloud computing offers. In this paper, first, we will present an overview of different known MOOCs platforms, then we will focus on Harvard and MIT initiative, edX, the MOOC platform that offers widened access to quality educational materials and courses supported by legendary professors and hosted by prestigious universities participating in the edX program such as Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley at California. Literally, we will describe a learning experience of a Software Engineering for Software as a Service course through edX platform. MOOC; higher education; cloud computing; edX.