Abstract
Educational social entrepreneurs which offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) create social value through removing inequality in terms of reaching educational resources to develop new skills required by the business world through offering free or low cost, high quality online courses to anyone anywhere and removing the barriers of traditional education cost, location, and access. The negative effects of COVID-19 pandemic on unemployment levels and new graduates' expectations about finding a job are apparent. As known, there has also been a long-standing debate over the insufficiency of traditional education models in terms of satisfying human resources qualifications needed by contemporary business world. After the pandemic, new jobs and new business models requiring new employee skills are also expected to occur. As a result, the understanding behind the MOOCs and the importance of social entrepreneurs which offer MOOCs increased. For these reasons, the purpose of this chapter is to examine MOOCs platforms and their actions to create social value during the COVID-19 pandemic.
TopBackground
MOOC stands for four words, namely “Massive” meaning broad participation of global users with various background and demography, “Open” meaning freedom of participation, “Online” meaning connecting through the Internet and finally “Course” meaning lectures designed for online learning (Lubis et al., 2020, pp. 2716).
Key Terms in this Chapter
COVID-19: An infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus and spread throughout the world.
Social Value: Creating benefits to solve some social problems and to satisfy some social needs.
Reskilling: Training employees to teach a completely new job.
Lifelong Learning: Improving oneself through taking courses for new interests, reskilling and upskilling.
Digitalization: Use of digital technologies as businesses, governments, educational institutes, and individuals.
Upskilling: Training employees to teach additional skills.
Social Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs whose core business create a social value as well as profit.
Social Impact: Effect of companies’ actions on larger society and members of society.
MOOCs: Massive open online courses provided by online education platforms offering free or low cost, high quality online courses to anyone anywhere and removing the barriers of traditional education cost, location, and access.