The MOOC market: Prospects for Russia

As massive open online courses (MOOC) rapidly invaded the education services market at the beginning of the 21st century, a new trend emerged in global education. In the era of globalization and digitization, MOOC acts as an efficient tool to promote universities in the international educational arena, popularize national cultures, and raise additional funds. This is why a lot of countries, including Russia, have entered the race for online courses. Despite all the focus on MOOC in global education, the proportion of studies analyzing the MOOC market and the prospects for MOOCs in the Russian context is rather small. This article mainly seeks to describe the MOOC market and behavioral patterns of MOOC providers in the international and national online education markets as well as to classify MOOC players based on open source data collected from online platforms. As a conclusion, platform data analysis findings are used to identify vacant niches in the MOOC market, and possible avenues of Russian providers' development in the international segment are assessed. Several data sources are utilized to solve the study objectives: articles, reports, official MOOC-related documents, information from online platform websites, a body of quantitative data collected from two leading online platforms, and a base of quantitative data from the Class Central aggregator, which contains information on MOOCs offered by several major online platforms.