Impact of MOOCs on Chinese Higher Education Reform

Supported by the modern information technology, MOOCs are highly popular with the characteristics of the wide-opening courses, transparent information of learning, and high quality resources sharing. Although there are a series of problems existing in MOOCs such as the limitations of promotion and application, teaching methods being questioned, no guarantee of teaching quality, and difficulty in preventing cheating etc., MOOCs still have a profound influence on the higher-education reform: providing unprecedented convenience to learners, making the flipped classroom a new favorite in teaching-design and innovating the managerial ideas of university organization, with the influence extending to the whole education ecological areas. MOOCs are the English abbreviation of "Massive Open Online Courses". The first letter "M" represents "Massive", which means the massive number of registered participants, with tens of thousands for each course. The second letter "O" represents "Open", open to any one who wants to learn something, which creates a strong atmosphere of learning and interest oriented. The third letter "O" represents "Online", which means using an objective and automatic online learning assessment system with flexible time and space, using large open online courses network to interact and respond with participants, and self regulating learning process to ensure the interaction between teaching and learning. It opens 24 hours a day to ensure that the problems are solved timely. MOOCs a recently emerging development model of online course are derived from an old course development model which releases online resources, focuses on learning management system and combines it with more open network resources. Simply, MOOCs are open online courses distributed in network, which are organized by those with the spirit of sharing and cooperation, aiming to promote knowledge dissemination.