ABSTRACT
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a worldwide growing topic of research and development in online learning. Universities, industry, and diverse educational institutions have found a way to carry out developments, implementations, and research on MOOCs. North America and Europe have well-documented and informed research regarding the state-of-the-art concerning the current status, issues, and future of MOOCs. Latin American institutions, in contrast, have been late entries to the MOOC world. To make matters worse, scientific information on the state of MOOCs in Latin America is slowly evolving, scattered, incomplete, and often confusing in terms of the actual developments, implementations, and research. To address this concern, Sánchez and Reyes-Rojas have researched the scientific production around MOOCs in Latin America (2014–2019) to draw attention to trends and issues concerning this topic. This Chilean research team conducted a systematic literature research review study concerning the studies, research, reports, and experiences informed in the indexed scientific literature concerning MOOCs in Latin America. Sánchez and Reyes-Rojas characterized the phenomenon to draw some main trends and issues. In particular, they address research questions concerning the distribution of the scientific productivity throughout the scientific databases chosen, the types of documents/publications, study areas, impact of this productivity of MOOCs in Latin America on the scientific community, the profiles of the most productive MOOC researchers, and the places, institutions, nuclei, and programs from where that scientific production emanates. In the end, Sánchez and Reyes-Rojas offer a comprehensive picture and characterization of the MOOC phenomenon in Latin America via what may be the first attempt to perform a systematic literature research study of it. Finally, some major trends and issues are drawn and discussed from the unique data and information gathered.
