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Active 9 years, 6 months ago
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In 2013, FutureLearn launched and University of Leicester joined as a partner. In late 2013 and early 2014, University of Leicester launched its first two MOOCs: England in the Time of King Richard III and Forensic Science and Criminal Justice. These MOOCs were extensively evaluated and discovered to have a very high student completion rate (approximately 25% of all registrants completed study, compared to average MOOC completion rates often at 5% to 10%), relatively low production and running costs, and some simple and clever innovations in creating learning material and engaging discussion. Moreover, there are early indications that MOOC students are deciding to apply for places on regular degree courses, despite the fact that the learner demographic was weighted more heavily toward the 56-65 age bracket (Padilla et al., 2014) Lessons learnt from the first two MOOCs and evaluation are being applied in new MOOCs launching in 2015, especially in the hope of enlisting the MOOCs to benefit the university’s core teaching and to encourage widening participation. It has also been found that academics participating in MOOC design have been inspired to try new pedagogical approaches in their own current ‘traditional’ course teaching. In addition, workshops on course design sharing the principles implemented in the MOOC courses and making use of the MOOC learner analytics, have been run at the university, thereby beginning the mainstreaming of open education at the university.
This lightning talk will highlight some of these ‘MOOC good practices’ to inspire practitioners of both open and traditional courses, and both blended and online teaching, and will explore down what path MOOCs are leading UK universities, and with what benefits and cautions.
Padilla, B., Bird, T. and Conole, G. (2014) Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Evaluation Report, Leicester.
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