A Research Agenda on MOOCs: The Perspective of Social Sciences,

Originated to help academic institutions innovate pedagogical models, MOOCs are taking different routes, some of them marked by public policies, others by market strategies. Questioning the MOOC phenomenon according only to pedagogies and learning theories means, however, underestimating their impact on the evolution of educational systems. This article intends to define a research agenda into the social impact of MOOCs, in order to reflect on changes in educational policies, on academic culture, and on learning measurement. For this reason we suggest focusing attention on three features of MOOC phenomenology: MOOCs as a social movement - an active policy to request a greater democratization of education - MOOC as a medium and a cultural artifact (mediated texts, videos, interface, platform’ functionalities) able to convey learning to distant learners - and, at last, MOOC as a measurement - in other words as a strumentation (i.e. learning statements, analytics, algorythms, visualizion tools, dashboards etc) that allows you to monitor, analyze and optimize the effectiveness of online teaching and learning, highlighting also their limits.