Professional development through MOOCs in higher education institutions: challenges and opportunities for Phd students working as mentors

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are making a noticeable impact in Higher education Institutions (HEIs) at a global scale. Every year, new universities incorporate MOOCs in their educational catalogues, and the number of courses on offer has not stopped growing since the launch of the first MOOCs in 2008. Data collected by the team of the Class Central MOOC aggregator (https://www.class-central.com) shows that in 2016 the number of MOOCs identified has reached 4000. The same aggregator identifies more than 600 Universities as MOOC providers. Another figure to be highlighted is the number of learners enrolled in MOOCs: more than 35 million in 2015, twice as many as those in the previous year. There is also a tendency towards internationalisation and multilingualism, as the percentage of MOOCs in English has slightly decreased. Spain and France, whose largest platforms are MiridadX and FUN respectively, lead the ranking of non English speaking countries in terms of the number of MOOCs offered