Service Science: The Foundations of Service Engineering and Management

Chapter 8

Online Education Service and MOOCs

Radically, this chapter continues the discussion in Chapter 7, essentially serving as supplementary contents that complement the previous chapter. In Chapter 7, based on the known systems performance of a service system, we mainly focused on identifying some high priority factors that impacted the outcomes of consumed services and then recommended viable actions to retune the service system in real time for competitive advantage. To fully capture and understand people-centric service management and operations, we must explore what kind of service products people as individuals want, how they participate in the process of service transformation, and why they change their expectations throughout the service lifecycle. We understand that a service network approach must be investigated in order to accomplish this exploratory objective so that competitive services can be promptly discovered, personalized, designed and engineered, delivered, and improved in a repetitive and sustainable manner.

Approaches to improve education services in light of meeting different needs under different circumstances were the exploratory theme in Chapter 7. As we know, currently online teaching/learning is growing at a phenomenal rate. Indeed, online education is becoming a new trend, transforming the approach to higher education (Burnsed, (2011). The news on massive open online courses (MOOCs), starting from May 2012 when MIT and Harvard announced their ...