Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is essentially an asynchronous platform and a process for teaching through pre-recorded lectures, resource video materials, lecture notes, assignments and quizzes, which are usually online and provide self assessment in regular intervals during learning.
The learning, through scheduling of fixed time duration for completion of courses and, therefore, the simultaneous participation of teachers and a large number of students may be termed synchronous and is thus similar to a classroom, albeit on the Internet and being much larger in size.