Compared with Coursera and edX, Chinese platforms have moved more rapidly  in carrying out blended teaching with MOOC resources, and they have closely integrated MOOC resources with university education and teaching reforms since their establishment. As early as 2014, XuetangX launched “CloudXuetang,” providing cooperative institutions with customised education cloud platform services. In 2015, China University MOOC released the “CloudSchool” platform. In addition to offering support to all college teachers to develop online private broadcast courses (small scale private online courses (SPOC)), it also encourages teachers to put in place online course resources and carry out blended teaching and flipped classroom practices inside the university. “CloudXuetang” and “CloudSchool” are basically consistent with Coursera for Campus in terms of function, but were released much earlier than Coursera. In addition, XuetangX also developed the “Rain Classroom” and matching smart tools such as a laser pointer with remote control. China University MOOC launched the “MOOC Classroom” application in 2019. Using “Rain Classroom” and “MOOC Classroom,” teachers can better connect online learning to class teaching. They can also quickly assess data on their students’ learning behaviours after class by launching comment sign-in, instant evaluation exercises, discussion and brainstorming, and other activities. As a result, the quantification and innovation of class teaching activities can be achieved to meet the changing objectives of class teaching.

In China, blended teaching based on MOOC resources has also been the subject of attention and support from the educational authorities. At the end of October 2019, the “Implementation Opinions of the Ministry of Education on the Construction of First-Class Undergraduate Courses” called on all the teachers to “use proper digital teaching instruments, to reform the university’s courses in combination with the reality of the university, to arrange 20-50% of teaching practice for students’ online autonomous learning, and to carry out flipped classroom and blended teaching with the natural integration of offline face-to-face tutorial based on MOOCs, exclusive online courses, and other online courses.” Among the 10,000 or so national first-class undergraduate courses, as many as 6,000 are online-offline blended first-class courses. China Education Daily also published an article entitled A MOOC Experiment Across Four Universities in Four Provinces, which gave a detailed description of how Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, Qinghai University, and Guizhou Institute of Technology all make use of the same MOOC resources to carry out student-centred blended teaching practice based on their own local situation. Against this background, all universities became more active in blended teaching based on MOOCs in 2019. Some universities have started to formulate policies, funding, and business support for blended teaching and have taken the initiative to seek cooperation with platforms like XuetangX and China University MOOC.

Overall, both Chinese and international practitioners regard blended teaching based on MOOC resources as a new breakthrough at the current stage of MOOC development and its integration with higher education. Chinese MOOC platforms are undoubtedly ahead of the platforms like Coursera and edX with regard to promoting the implementation of blended teaching in the form of finalised products. This can also be viewed as a major innovation and breakthrough in promoting the construction and application of MOOCs. For educational researchers, blended teaching with MOOC resources presents a number of questions that still need to be explored, such as models, methods, and strategies for blended teaching, requirements for teaching capacity in blended teaching, and how education equality and efficiency are affected by blended teaching. In the future, the blended teaching services offered by MOOC platforms will also become a new profit area that will enable them to achieve sustainable development.

IV. The issue of sustainability of MOOCs remains an urgent problem to be addressed

The issue of the sustainable development of MOOCs has received much attention and criticism. In recent years, there have been frequent statements such as “MOOCs have died” or “the development of MOOCs has slowed down.” Seen from the perspective of the global development of MOOCs in 2019, there have indeed been some “negative events.” For example, the Australian MOOC platform Open2Study officially closed in 2019 (Bowden, 2019). The platform was founded in 2013 and had nearly 2 million learners before its closure, and was also one of the few MOOC platforms that continued to provide free course certificates. The Global Freshman Academy project jointly released by edX and Arizona State University almost came to an end in 2019. The project started in 2015 and enabled learners to freely choose and learn courses within the project, with courses paid and transferred to formal credits of Arizona State University at their completion. The project received great attention when it launched and was regarded as an important trial of MOOC credit certification and transfer. The project fully embodied the integration of MOOCs with higher education, as well as the goal of lowering the cost of degrees by online means. However, after several years of operation, the actual level of participation in the project was not ideal. Now, only three courses remain open, and the person in charge of the project at Arizona State University stated that the university has switched its energy to a new project named Earned Admission (McKenzie, 2019), though the project is still in operation on edX. Compared with two years earlier, Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn have clearly slowed down their exploration of new models and new products. It seems that all platforms have adopted a relatively stable operation strategy, and received less exposure in the media and at international conferences compared with a few years ago.

The low completion rate and high drop-off rate of MOOCs is a major issue facing the sustainable development of MOOCs. Previous research has shown that the completion rate of most of the MOOC courses should be around 5% (Jordan, 2014; Loeckx, 2016). An essay published in Science in 2019 analysed the learning retention rate of learners on MOOC platforms. The study tracked 2012-2018 course learners registered on Harvardx and MITx and found that the retention rate of users on the MOOC platforms decreases with the passage of time. Taking users registered in 2012-2013 as an example, only 8% of users still had course learning behaviours in 2017-2018. Only 7% of the users registered to study in 2013-2014 still had course learning behaviours in 2017-2018. In other words, MOOC users are dropping out. The number of new learners in the two school years of 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 also decreased. At the same time, the problem of low completion rate of MOOCs courses remains unsolved. Furthermore, it is difficult to realise the MOOCs’ original objective of promoting equal access to education and enabling people in less-developed areas to access world-class higher education. Currently, the vast majority of MOOC learners is from rich countries and regions, and most are already in official employment (Reich & Ruiperez-Valiente, 2019).