MOOC’s, short for Massive Open Online Courses, are a real trend these days. With costs of education rising in countries like the US, UK and even the Netherlands, alternatives are gaining in popularity.
What is a MOOC?
There are several aspects that define online courses to be actual MOOC’s. Firstly, they are Massive, with some of the most popular courses guiding 100.000+ students. The first massive course was Stanford’s artificial intelligence course in 2011 with 150.000 students! More defining are that these courses are online and open for everyone. Even though some of the courses ask a fee for a verified certificate with your name on it, the basic learning is free and everything is accessible.
With internet still coming up as a strong way of commerce in this day and age, researchers looked into ways consumers’ purchase decisions can be influenced by each other. Chen et al. (2011) started looking at online word of mouth and online observational learning as ways this might happen.
So imagine you are working on co-creating a physical product with people from all over the world. Now, you want to explain to your co-creators how you would like to adjust some attributes of the product. But since their not physically near you, explaining exactly what you mean would be considered hard by most.
What if there was some way to see a model of your product right in front of you, your co-creators had the same model in front of them and you would all be able to work on it real-time?
Consumer Value Creation 