Approximately half the world's population has access to the Internet , and all institutions have their own websites. In an increasingly interconnected and knowledge-sharing information society, the knowledge accumulated by humanity in all fields of knowledge is easily archived, indexed, and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Institutions around the world are offering exciting new opportunities for enriching theoretical knowledge for anyone who wants to learn online, thanks to the development of e-learning platforms made available to everyone free of charge. More and more universities, organizations, institutions, and companies are offering e-learning services (in Italian, "online learning"), allowing users to choose when and where to take courses based on their needs.
What are MOOCs?
MOOCs , an acronym for Massive Open Online Courses , offer users lessons, teaching materials, exercises, and discussion forums. Unlike traditional classroom courses, they have specific features that allow them to reach a large number of users. First of all, they are interactive , as there is the possibility of exchanging feedback with teachers asynchronously, in order to evaluate the user's preparation between lessons; they are independent of space and time , as distance learning can take place through any interdigital device; finally, they are multimedia , as these services can be accessed through a varied range of channels, thus integrating video, audio, and text. Over the years, numerous MOOC aggregators have emerged, offering courses on various topics and in multiple languages: the most famous are the sites Khan Academy , Coursera , Udacity , EdX , Iversity and the new mooc aggregator EMMA , the only truly multilingual platform created under a European brand in collaboration with the Federico II University of Naples.
New ways of learning
Before the advent of the web, learning to perform a skill was much more difficult and expensive: for example, to learn to play a musical instrument, you had to go to a private instructor or enroll in a course. Today, the web offers unmissable opportunities, as knowledge is just a click away for anyone with the ability and willingness to connect to the internet. Thanks to the proliferation of free MOOCs, you can easily follow high-quality courses from anywhere. The substantial difference between the thousands of tutorials on YouTube and the MOOCs offered by the sites mentioned above lies in the reliability and authoritativeness of the sources.
Ermanno Starita
