MOOC: Challenges and Opportunities of Higher Education

With the rapid development of information technology, various approaches are applied to higher education. Massive open online course (MOOC), as a recent development of distance education, emerged in 2012. Nowadays, the utilization of MOOC has become the tide of globalization among universities. The aim of this paper is to take a deep look at MOOC for weighing its pros and cons. The reasons of popularity of MOOC via introducing its brief history, key characteristic and major advantages are explained in this paper. In addition, challenges and limitations of existing MOOCs worldwide are presented though course structure, course grades and completion rate as well as several solutions to deal with them as far as possible.