Attributes of English-language massive open online courses in academic context

During the pandemic, an active introduction of online education demonstrated, besides some organizing difficulties, a great number of its obvious advantages as compared with face-to-face education. Among these advantages of massive open online courses (MOOC) are interactivity, immediate feedback, clear structure, etc. When creating MOOCs, their authors take into consideration requirements of contemporary educational context and learners’ cognitive specifics. The purpose of the article is to analyze discursive features of the MOOCs in English that reflect the nature of distance learning communication (synchronous and asynchronous) in academic context and how modern learners process information. Two courses available at the educational platform Coursera were chosen for the analysis. The research was conducted by means of discourse analysis with further application of qualitative and quantitative methods. The author concluded that MOOC discourse presents information in portions, has a distinctive structure, clearly formulates the purpose of each informational portion for studying the course, is dialogic and replete with explanations.