And, what happened before the MOOC?

Abstract

The phenomenon MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) exceeded the interest of the academic world to settle in society as a democratizing education argument. But MOOC have not arisen by spontaneous generation, as might be inferred from such literature poured over the past three years. To prove that the MOOC have supposed, not a break, but an evolution of distance education, a review of relevant literature that comes to mark the milestones of the historical evolution of this type of education. Thus the four inserts in the acronym MOOC (course, massive, open and online) terms, there arose in 2011, when the emergence of the MOOC, but were dynamically appearing throughout the history of distance education.