Applied educational innovation MOOC

Abstract

Due to the increasing training demand, technological advances, access to information and movements such as open social learning or open educational resources have foster the emergence of new educational approaches, a clear example of this is the Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. Focusing on the development of one of these massive courses, the MOOC "Applied Educational Innovation", this research aims to study the participants' experience in this MOOC, just in order not only to meet their interests when making the course, but also what attitudes they had during the development of it and how they valued aspects such as organization, content, materials or evaluation, all of this, trying to know the MOOC strengths and which aspects can be improved. To do that, a quantitative and descriptive approach has been taken into account, using variables as gender, age, nationality, professional profile, previous experience in this kind of courses, interest in the topic of the MOOC, interest for the course and level in performing the MOOC. For data collection, a questionnaire has been designed following the SEEQ model that has been fulfilled by 1,047 MOOC participants. After analyzing the data, very interesting results have been drawn, underling that heterogeneity of profiles has not present a significant difference in the responses of the participants. Given the good results obtained, we may consider this MOOC as a model that provides substantial improvements that may be adopted by other institutions that want to develop new courses under the MOOC trend. However, there is much ground to cover and this study has also raised proposals for helping us improving the proposal based on two sources: the participants' opinions reflected on the questionnaire, as well as those who have contributed in a semistructured interview.

MOOC-O-Bot: Using Cognitive Technologies to Extend Knowledge Support in MOOCs

“…Teachers in MOOCs have to make sense of all activity, engagement and interactions and are often unable to make the most of the "teacher presence". On the other hand, students are often facing feeling of confusion and loneliness as they are not able to get the right answers when they need them [6]. Thus, MOOCs have opened up a new pool of opportunities for using cognitive technologies to improve the educational experience.…”