al-Farabi Kazakh National University is a leader among Kazakhstani universities in implementing MOOCs on the OpenEdx open platform.
Since the 2014-2015 academic year, the Distance Education Center of al-Farabi KazNU, together with the faculty, has begun work on creating MOOCs. Currently, their own MOOC platform based on the Open edX system is operational at .
On October 1, 2015, the first open courses were launched by leading professors of al-Farabi KazNU - Probability Theory and Physics Problems with Associate Professor V. Kashkarov. Around 250 and 500 listeners from different regions of Kazakhstan enrolled in these courses, respectively. Mostly, students from the 1st and 2nd years of al-Farabi KazNU, senior classes of Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, specialized physics-mathematical and secondary schools were trained in these courses. Data analysis showed significant interest in these courses, which encourages faculty and university staff to continue working in this direction. By the end of June 2016, more than two thousand listeners were registered in the system.
With active support from al-Farabi KazNU, the National Platform for Open Education of Kazakhstan (hereinafter - NPOOEK) was launched.
As part of the implementation of a set of measures to develop e-learning and organize the work of NPOOEK to train personnel based on distance educational technologies (DET) and strengthen the work of the Distance Education Center (DEC), with the aim of increasing the mobility of providing educational services of the university for new educational programs, the university administration made a decision (Rector's Order No. 45 of 29.01.2016) to transform the structural unit "Distance Education Center" into the "Institute of Distance Education" (IDE), within which the Center for Massive Open Online Courses (CMOOC) was created as a project office of the national platform. The position of the MOOC center, as well as the job descriptions of the head, lead specialist, and specialist of the CMOOC center were developed and approved by the Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs Ahmed-Zaki D.Zh. (as of March 14, 2016) (as of January 10, 2019).
In February 2016, the Institute of Distance Education was transformed into the Institute of New Educational Technologies, within which the CMOOC continues to operate.
