Occupy MOOCs: An overview with John Carroll
Channel: Center for Online Innovation in Learning
Date: 2015-04-24

Occupy MOOCs: Understanding and design for actual student motivations and activities in MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have inspired rethinking and innovation in university education. Tens of thousands of enrolled students is a disruptive scale factor that that raises new possibilities and challenges, while inviting new visions and agendas. The growing popularity of MOOCs has engendered a new body of research on related topics in education and technology, for example the types of tools that can best support MOOCs, new teaching practices, information and course management, the experiences, learning activities, and outcomes for students, and so on. This is a huge opportunity: understanding of learning experiences in MOOCs is at an early stage. Educational practices in the most widely distributed MOOC courses are often uninformed by theory or practice in education. MOOC platforms and systems are rather poor examples of collaborative systems.

We will analyze course data from MOOCs to characterize the motivations and experiences, learning activities, and outcomes for all MOOC students, including the vast majority who do not finish and propose design plans based on these results. We will then develop and implement instructional and platform design interventions that could enhance MOOC experiences and outcomes and address issues we have already identified and will identify, and then investigate those designs.

To learn more, visit: http://goo.gl/S5ZntM

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