Web-service for integration of current information from the leading MOOCs

Abstract

Purpose. A phenomenon called MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) plays a special, “revolutionary” role, introducing of online learning for all stages of the educational process. Today there are a lot of MOOCs, the largest of them: Coursera, edX, Udacity. In connection with the large amount of resources for additional education, a number of questions arise: “How to choose the suitable course as an additional education, how to use the capabilities of MOOCs to improve the quality of the educational process at the university, how to minimize the time for finding the desired course on different platforms?”
The purpose of the work is to create a unified information resource that allows you to integrate relevant information from various MOOCs, to reduce the time for finding an appropriate online course for the user, and to raise awareness about new courses and popular specializations, related to information technology.
Materials and methods. Web-service is designed as one of the components of the information-educational environment of the Institute of System Analysis and Management. It is aimed at different groups of users: “motivated” students, “unmotivated” students, and lecturers.
The initial data for the service is open information about the current online courses on the MOOCs Coursera, edX and Udacity.
Each project has its own API, which allows you to get information about online courses. Since MOOCs do not have a common vocabulary in order to use it for searching, there is the problem of creating such a dictionary. To do this we use the Stack Exchange resource (stackexchange.com). The list of keywords is formed through the Stack Exchange API – we select the most popular tags on sites softwareengineering.stackexchange.com and cs.stackexchange.com.
Results. As the first stage of implementation, a web application was developed that allows you to view and filter the lists of courses and to see detailed information about the courses.
Conclusion. Today there are alpha-versions of two web-services within the information-educational environment of the Dubna State University. The first one is the web-service for collecting and analyzing data on the vacancies of specialists in the field of information technologies from the most popular Internet resources and the webservice that allows integrating information about online courses from the leading MOOC-sites.