The Peril and Promise of Pre-Tests in Informal Massive Open Online Courses

Author(s):  
Maria Janelli ◽  
Anastasiya Lipnevich

With more than 100,000,000 learners from around the world, massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular online learning resource. Because this type of online teaching and learning is relatively young, published MOOC research is not as voluminous as traditional educational research. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that best practices are not always clear, and there is not much MOOC research upon which to draw for specific instructional design strategies. The opportunity is to harness the power of MOOC platforms themselves to conduct research that examines and identifies effective digital pedagogy. In this chapter, the authors describe some of these challenges and opportunities. Specifically, they draw upon a multivariate experimental research study that examined the effects of pre-tests and feedback on learning and persistence in a MOOC. They offer practical implications that are related to study findings.

Author(s):  
Clare Lade ◽  
Paul Strickland ◽  
Elspeth Frew ◽  
Paul Willard ◽  
Sandra Cherro Osorio ◽  
...  

This chapter examines the ways in which teaching and training in tourism, hospitality and events have evolved and adapted to the contemporary demands of academia and industry. It explores the development of education in tourism, hospitality and events, the contemporary factors which influence teaching and learning, and discusses the rise of Massive Open Online Courses with a particular focus on their potential application within tourism, hospitality and events curriculum. The chapter concludes by providing an overview of Open Badges and their importance in education. At the time of writing, the world has been confronted by the Covid-19 global pandemic which has caused great disruption at all levels. The impact of Covid-19 is briefly addressed in this chapter as the enforcement of social distancing measures has led to a significant increase globally in online education.


Author(s):  
Nikleia Eteokleous ◽  
Rita Panaoura

In this chapter, the two authors co-construct meaning of their individual lived experiences as education faculty engaging in online teaching and learning. It highlights each faculty unique experiences facilitating graduate student learning in an online environment. Co-construction of meaning centers on pedagogical approaches, program design and focus, reflection of faculty-self experiences, employment of digital learning tools, and utilization of best practices of each faculty experience with teaching and learning in an online environment. This narrative is co-constructed following a collaborative autoethnographic approach by two faculty, whereby the central descriptions of each faculty member is situated in one's lived experiences and rich story of facilitating and instructing courses in an online learning environment. The faculty experiences are mainly derived from teaching graduate courses offered by a department of education. The research method in presenting two self-reflective narratives in online teaching and learning extends to doing “collaborative autoethnography.”


Author(s):  
Geraint Lang

Twenty First Century Education is undergoing change not only to keep in step with the emerging technological innovations, but also to address the needs and meet the high expectations of a technically sophisticated student body. Physical manifestations of these changes may be seen in new institutional building work. Technologically, the Facebook Generation of students in our universities expect online access across the campus, not only to all manner of information and social networks, but to their course work. A growing body of the student population now remain in full time employment, enrolled via online courses. Their virtual access to teaching and learning requires a different form of tuition to that generally experienced in face to face lectures. Online teaching and learning is a facilitated process, which this chapter seeks to explain. The role of the facilitator is explained, along with the process of online learning, with reference to an established online degree course, Ultraversity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-252
Author(s):  
Samaa Haniya ◽  
Luc Paquette

Understanding learner participation is essential to any learning environment to enhance teaching and learning, especially in large scale digital spaces, such as massive open online courses. However, there is a lack of research to fully capture the dynamic nature of massive open online courses and the different ways learners participate in these emerging massive e-learning ecologies. To fill in the research gap, this paper attempted to investigate the relationship between how learners choose to participate in a massive open online course, their initial motivation for learning, and the barriers they faced throughout the course. This was achieved through a combination of data-driven clustering approaches—to identify patterns of learner participation—and qualitative analysis of survey data—to better understand the learners’ motivation and the barriers they faced during the course. Through this study we show how, within the context of a Coursera massive open online course offered by the University of Illinois, learners with varied patterns of participation (Advanced, Balanced, Early, Limited, and Delayed Participation) reported similar motivations and barriers, but described differences in how their participation was impacted by those factors. These findings are significant to gain insights about learners’ needs which in turn serve as the basis to innovate more adaptive and personalized learning experiences and thus advance learning in these large scale environments.


Author(s):  
Håkan Eftring ◽  
Elinor Jeanette Olaussen ◽  
Helen Petrie ◽  
Merja Saarela ◽  
Tarja Ladonlahti ◽  
...  

The TINEL Project is running a series of camps for staff at higher education institution to support them in developing inclusive eLearning. The first camp was conducted face-to-face, but the coronavirus pandemic meant that the second camp was conducted online. This created a case study in inclusive eLearning in itself and allowed us to experience and reflect on the challenges and opportunities of inclusive online teaching and learning. This paper presents the structure and content of the two camps, our reflections on moving from a face-to-face to an online situation and our elaboration how the UDL principles apply to eLearning to create Universal Design for eLearning (UDeL). We found that because we already had a syllabus for the camp prepared, transferring it to an online camp did not present a great number of challenges. Some aspects of the online situation were actually advantageous (e.g. presenting all materials digitally and making them fully accessible) while others were difficult to overcome (e.g. engaging all participants in online activities and discussions). We provide a set of recommendations of how to implement the three principles of UDL in eLearning situations.


Author(s):  
Nurbiha A Shukor ◽  
Zaleha Abdullah

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) allows teaching and learning for everyone. This means that people from any learning background can join any of the courses offered through MOOC platforms. Although learning materials are offered for free, learning retention and learning engagement were found to be consistently low alt-hough some MOOC are offered by well-known instructors. Many recent studies tried to understand the suitable instructional design in MOOC to improve learning en-gagement and retention. This study is an exploratory study to evaluate the potential of using learning analytics to improve instructional design in MOOC. Data were col-lected from a MOOC offered for two consequent years in a public university in Ma-laysia. The impact of learning analytics on MOOC instructional design was also dis-cussed.


Author(s):  
Xiaobin Li

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the literature on massive open online course (MOOC) development in China, its accompanying practices, challenges, and opportunities. The chapter also offers recommendations derived from the literature on how to make MOOCs benefit more Chinese. To conduct this study, the author reviewed Chinese literature on MOOCs since 2012, when the first five articles on MOOCs appeared in Chinese journals, which introduced concepts and practices of Western MOOCs into China. The author also reviewed well-known English journals on online education and e-learning since 2013, when the first Chinese MOOCs appeared.


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