Trends and Issues With Massive Open Online Courses

Author(s):  
Kijpokin Kasemsap

This chapter reveals the overview of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the implications of MOOCs in the digital age. MOOCs are the Internet-based courses which have large numbers of students involved. MOOCs have a potential for helping college students succeed and for giving a preview of a particular university's teaching style to potential applicants. MOOCs can bring students from all over the world and encourage engagement between staff and students of a given university to interact with the wider public. Offering diverse classes on different topics through MOOCs makes it easy for students to keep up with the latest trends and be on top of their professional field. The chapter argues that encouraging MOOCs has the potential to improve educational performance and gain educational goals in the modern learning environments.

2015 ◽  
pp. 138-141
Author(s):  
Judith Buendgens-Kosten

The popularity of MOOCs – massive open online courses, i.e. online courses that can be used by large numbers of learners without formal entrance requirements – has skyrocketed in recent years, with a broad range of courses made available by major MOOC platforms such as Coursera, Udacity or EdX, but also by smaller providers. At the same time, very few MOOCs cover language learning. This review will discuss one MOOC – ‘Exploring English: language and culture’ – that attempted to close this gap, and will describe the specific challenges that language learning poses for MOOCs.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-226
Author(s):  
Lorraine A. Jacques

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to share a discussion with Dr Barry Fishman, University of Michigan, concerning how to use technology to improve the learning experience of students in higher education. Design/methodology/approach This article summarizes an interview with Dr Fishman conducted in December 2015. Findings Massive open online courses, personalized learning and changes in how we assess student learning are all opportunities that Fishman believes can improve both student outcomes and intrinsic motivation. Originality/value Changes in technology can enable researchers and educators easier access to implementing various learning environments.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095624782098775
Author(s):  
Fabian Suter ◽  
Christoph Lüthi

The water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector is facing a shortfall of several million appropriately skilled professionals. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) can play a crucial role in addressing this. This paper presents the case study of the MOOC series “Sanitation, Water and Solid Waste for Development”, which has reached over 120,000 learners within six years. It has attracted mainly well-educated, employed learners, under 34 years old, from Asia, Latin America and Africa. Underrepresentation of female learners remains a challenge. While MOOCs have proven excellent for delivering WASH education at scale, some alternative formats (e.g. blended learning, small private online courses) allow more collaborative, interactive learning environments. Three practical examples from Nigeria, Indonesia and Mozambique indicate the potential for synergies among MOOCs and further learning formats. With the global shift towards digital learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, MOOCs have gained further traction.


Author(s):  
Oleksandra Skrypnyk ◽  
Srećko Joksimović ◽  
Vitomir Kovanović ◽  
Dragan Gašević ◽  
Shane Dawson

<p>Distributed Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are based on the premise that online learning occurs through a network of interconnected learners. The teachers’ role in distributed courses extends to forming such a network by facilitating communication that connects learners and their separate personal learning environments scattered around the Internet. The study reported in this paper examined who fulfilled such an influential role in a particular distributed MOOC – a connectivist course (cMOOC) offered in 2011. Social network analysis was conducted over a socio-technical network of the Twitter-based course interactions, comprising both human course participants and hashtags; where the latter represented technological affordances for scaling course communication. The results of the week-by-week analysis of the network of interactions suggest that the teaching function becomes distributed among influential actors in the network. As the course progressed, both human and technological actors comprising the network subsumed the teaching functions, and exerted influence over the network formation. Regardless, the official course facilitators preserved a high level of influence over the flow of information in the investigated cMOOC.</p>


Author(s):  
Gundeea Narrainen

With more and more courses being offered online teachers are constantly being asked to change their teaching style. Online courses have taken another turn with the innovation, which are the MOOCs. MOOCs being non-fee paying courses, delivered mostly by recognised universities, course organisation and management was bound to change. With less than 10% successful completion rate for MOOC courses and keeping in mind the Mauritian context, the Open University of Mauritius decided to offer a hybrid MOOC. By hybrid Daniel Peraya suggests blended courses that is online training and face-to-face sessions. It is more about tutoring and guiding students rather than mere teaching. Our main objective is to show the effectiveness of a Hybrid MOOC in terms of organisation and course structure. The methods used in this paper are: a survey questionnaire and data from a Moodle platform. The fact that this course has been organised in a blended mode has helped the participants to reach the end of the training with a higher completion rate, face to face sessions helped students to interact, the use of Moodle as an additional platform accessssed by a restricted number of participants proved to be helpful to get aquainted to online learning.


Author(s):  
Sónia Rolland Sobral ◽  

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are open courses offered to an indefinite number of participants and accessible through virtual learning environments. These courses have been the subject of research all over the world. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the scientific production on Massive Open Online Courses in journals indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus. The sample is composed by 1908 articles in total. The results obtained by bibliometric analysis showed that the publication continue to increase, in which journals they are published, which are the organizations and countries that publish the most, and which are the most cited articles. We concluded that since Massive Open Online Courses are a reality, there still seems to be a possibility for evolution in good quality publications.


Author(s):  
Oussama HAMAL ◽  

This paper principally seeks to examine the genesis and development of MOOCs. Recent research and ICT development efforts have strived to engineer technologies that aim at effectively facilitating and improving the quality of learning anywhere and anytie independently in a stress-free environment. It must be noted that research in open learning environments is still making baby steps and researchers have solely made preliminary initiatives to fathom out the nature and incessant chaniging dynamics of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as a topic of investigation. This interest is fuled by the fact that learning has nearly completely become digital worldwide as it were, and there for eperpetual research efforts to understand the underlying principles of MOOCs is a genuine necessity. More importantly, it has been proven in research that when computer science and education are mixed together, they seem to yield impeccable learning results. Given this, we will both chart a roadmap for the creation of a MOOC and incrementally work towards its implementation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Savat ◽  
Greg Thompson

One of the more dominant themes around the use of Deleuze and Guattari's work, including in this special issue, is a focus on the radical transformation that educational institutions are undergoing, and which applies to administrator, student and educator alike. This is a transformation that finds its expression through teaching analytics, transformative teaching, massive open online courses (MOOCs) and updateable performance metrics alike. These techniques and practices, as an expression of control society, constitute the new sorts of machines that frame and inhabit our educational institutions. As Deleuze and Guattari's work posits, on some level these are precisely the machines that many people in their day-to-day work as educators, students and administrators assemble and maintain, that is, desire. The meta-model of schizoanalysis is ideally placed to analyse this profound shift that is occurring in society, felt closely in the so-called knowledge sector where a brave new world of continuous education and motivation is instituting itself.


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Yeager ◽  
Betty Hurley-Dasgupta ◽  
Catherine A. Bliss

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continue to attract press coverage as they change almost daily in their format, number of registrations and potential for credentialing. An enticing aspect of the MOOC is its global reach. In this paper, we will focus on a type of MOOC called a cMOOC, because it is based on the theory of connectivism and fits the definition of an Open Educational Resource (OER) identified for this special edition of JALN. We begin with a definition of the cMOOC and a discussion of the connectivism on which it is based. Definitions and a research review are followed with a description of two MOOCs offered by two of the authors. Research on one of these MOOCs completed by a third author is presented as well. Student comments that demonstrate the intercultural connections are shared. We end with reflections, lessons learned and recommendations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Doneker ◽  
Bethany Willis Hepp ◽  
Debra Berke ◽  
Barbara Settles

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document