MOOC in the Arab world: a case study

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been spreading and receiving attention worldwide in the last few years. Universities mainly in the USA led the trend in distributing online courses to interested students across the globe. The Middle East is no exception. Recently, the MOOC movement started to gain some popularity in this region. The end of year 2013 witnessed the beginning of the fi rst Arabic MOOC in the Arab World, namely Rwaq. What makes this initiative unique is that the course content is in Arabic, and presented by Arab lecturers to Arabic-speaking students.