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In 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a Solingen-born professor at Stanford University, made his course "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence", including the final exam, fully accessible on his YouTube channel. Within a few weeks, thousands of people signed up for the course, while three months later, 160,000 people from 190 countries had attended the course, with 23,000 of them taking the online final exam. Just as ripples spreading out when a single pebble is dropped into water, MOOCs, which began in the USA and then spread around the world, had caught the attention of media outlets both inside and outside the U.S. This widespread attention to MOOCs, an online educational alternative, in the daily press has sparked the interest of media scientists from various countries. This study builds on the achievements of their researches, but extends the previous researches with question. Question 1 – What are the similarities and differences in the content of MOOC coverage in the American and Chinese media? Question 2 – If the analysed MOOC coverage in the USA and in the PRC satisfy the criteria of media hype identified?
The first question is addressed with a content analysis of all MOOC-related articles in the New York Times (USA) and Guangming Daily (China) for the period 2011 to 2020. The analysis reveals major differences in the content of MOOC coverage between the USA and the PRC, which can be primarily attributed to the varying challenges faced by the respective education systems of the two countries. To answer the second question, the paper employed the criteria defined by Dutch media scholar Peter Vastermann to identify media hype. The comparison of the two news outlets shows that the New York Times’ MOOC coverage meets all the criteria for media hype, while the coverage of the Guangming Daily is characterized by a growing interest in the topic of MOOC, but does not satisfy any of the Vastermann criteria.