Massive Open Online Courses: Combining Methodologies and Architecture for a Success Learning

Internet worldwide adoption has influenced several trends in human behavior, and social phenomena represented through the ever-increasing popularity of social networks have created new conversational arenas. New media-sharing technologies have allowed users to consume information from countless sources, including media that have been remixed and co-created by a crowd. Teachers' roles are evolving toward amplifying, curating, aggregating, filtering, modeling, knowledge sense-making, and so on in a course. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as an educational disruptive innovation. Early experiences from Wiley, Couros, Siemens, and Downes in North America were created to take advantage of the vast number of interested learners, eager to take such MOOCs. Moreover, Hernández Rizzardini and Delgado in Latin America had already achieved the same results some years earlier (from 2005 to 2007). Along with the opportunities that arose, a variety of problems appeared, including high dropout rates, student anonymity, insufficient support, and several other issues such as student assessment and communication overflow. Furthermore, MOOCs brought about a set of new challenges in meeting all these demands with enhanced and scalable technology, using innovative tools to improve the learning experience. We have received excellent contributions which were included in this special issue. Different contexts are covered, such as analytics, adaptability, orchestration, tool innovation, course development, and mobile assistants. The use of Semantic Web technologies has become relevant, first by orchestrating innovative learning activities using cloud-based tools (Web 2.0 tools) through a Linked Data automatic advanced interoperability approach. Moreover, Linked Data is also used to find Open