Nowadays, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have raised great expectations due to their potential for changing the relationship between students and professors, academy and the general community. To conceptualize, the terms “course”, “online”, “massive” and “open” have been redefined and reinvented so many times that it is difficult to offer a wide broad definition to cover their whole activity, for example, the term “massive” most of the times it only refers to the number of learners joined, but it does not refers to the massive desertion levels. This document presents a comparative analysis for 11 MOOCs that obtained a terminal efficiency equal to or less than 11% and a MOOC whose calculated terminal efficiency was of 22.35%. This last course was created as part of a teacher training strategy, was developed at Coursera’s platform and 10,161 total learners from 81 different countries joined. The obtained results describe the characteristics of the participants, the technological resources, the tools and the didactic strategies implemented by the instructors. It is concluded that without a correct measurement of the final results, it is not possible to evaluate the success of a MOOC, so the institutions and consortia must establish indicators to focus the efforts in order to improve the quality of teaching.

Keywords

desertion · terminal efficiency