Research literatures show that there is very limited research in HE (higher education) academics’ experience of designing courses especially in online context. MOOCs (massive open online courses) emerged as a new online teaching form has attracted a lot of interests from HE providers and researchers, but there is hardly any published research about HE academics’ experience of designing MOOCs. This paper aims to fill this research gap through a phenomenographic study of the UK (United Kingdom) HE academics’ experience of designing MOOCs to gain understanding of the possible variations of their understanding of and approaches to designing MOOCs. In this research project, twenty-two UK HE academics from six universities who have experience of designing MOOCs were interviewed. The phenomenographic data analysis revealed five categories of HE academics’ perceptions of designing MOOCs. This paper presents the revealed outcome space from the data analysis and discusses each category of description and the internal structure between the categories. The research results could inform course designers and MOOC development stakeholders as well as provide insight to researchers in this research area.