Adapting the MOOC model for mainstream education [689] Members : OER15

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Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm

Authors: Andrew Doig, and Hannah Watts

Room: Room 0.18 Ground Floor Main Building

Theme: Open Courses

Type: Lightning Talk

Description

Can the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) model be used as a catalyst for new approaches to supporting mainstream university students?

MOOCs, courses aimed at massive international audiences, require investment (approximately £30,000 per MOOC according to THE), hence why courses delivered via the big MOOC platforms such as FutureLearn and CourseEra are primarily developed by highly prestigious universities. An overriding concern for universities that do not have the resources to build courses that will reach out to a massive audience is, can development of open courses have a direct impact on how well we operate or how our students perform?

Is it possible to take this cutting-edge approach to learning provision and adapt it to something that suits a more mainstream agenda? Perhaps the MOOC approach to open education could be used in a way that is much more achievable by all, less costly in development, and available to be used and shared across the sector. Our University is in the process of tackling this challenge.

We have put our energies into developing transition OOCs – not so massive open online courses that help prospective or recruited students with their transition into our University. In 2015, we will run open courses for international students, HE to FE transition students and students joining postgraduate courses. Our goal is to improve the student experience, academic engagement and outcomes. It is also hoped that we will help the students to engage with support services that they may not otherwise identify during their freshers’ and induction weeks, or indeed throughout their university careers.

By creating a new open instance of our institutional VLE, we are able to invite students to join pre-enrolment, and make our courses available to others external to the University. Our courses are developed under Creative Commons meaning they can be repurposed by other Universities with similar goals.

Our MOOC adaptation puts learning design and student experience at the heart of each course. While embedding common instruction methods found in large-scale MOOCs, such as video content, quizzes and discussion boards to create a directed, structured learning journey, our open course model sees community building and collaboration as vital.

Student engagement will be driven by interactive activities that invite students to utilise social and digital media tools. Students can be tasked with creating vlogs and sound bites to answer assignment questions, participating on Padlet boards or interacting in Google Hangouts. Perhaps the most exciting prospect is allowing students to become co-creators, whereby they have the freedom to add content that other learners can view and edit. Existing students will be recruited as online ambassadors to encourage and participate in this online community to enhance the authenticity and usefulness of the learning experience for our prospective students.

Our lightening talk will present our development principles, model and methodology, as well as forecasting the running and evaluation of our OOCs which will be further disseminated following our first delivery cycle.

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