The UnMOOCing Process: Extending the Impact of MOOC Educational Resources as OERs

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) came into the educational ecosystem attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world. The original courses were completely open and free, targeting the worldwide population. However, current MOOC providers have pivoted towards more private directions, and we often find that MOOC materials are completely closed within their hosting platforms and cannot be retrieved from them by their learners. This diminishes the potential of MOOCs by making content available to a small proportion of learners and severely limits the reusability of the educational resources. In this paper, we present a process that we call ‘unMOOCing’, in which we transform the resources of a MOOC into OERs. We taught a MOOC on Open Education in the UNED Abierta platform, and we ‘unMOOCed’ all of its educational resources, making them available to download by the learners that are taking the course. The results of the unMOOCing were very encouraging: the possibility of downloading the course resources was the most highly rated component of the course. Additionally, the two unMOOCed materials that were considered as most useful (presentations and contents in a PDF) were downloaded by 90% of the learners. Now that the majority of MOOC providers are moving towards a more closed educational approach, we believe that this paper sends a powerful message for bringing back the original MOOC concept of ‘Openness’ with the unMOOCing process, thus contributing to the wider dissemination and democratization of education across the globe.

Comparison of students’ use and acceptance of emergency online learning due to COVID-19 in the USA, Mexico, Peru, and Turkey

“…The pandemic will be over, but the use of OERs should continue, as they are useful tools that can improve the learning process online, hybrid, or face-to-face. Educators can use their creativity and OERs to personalize learning, make the content more relevant, or adapt it to local context or specific student needs (Kadada and Tshabalala 2020 ; Ruipérez-Valiente et al 2020 ; Van Allen and Katz 2020 ).…”

“…More higher education institutions are incorporating online learning as part of their educational programs. Therefore, higher education institutions should provide training to professors to ensure that better technological systems and instructional strategies are incorporated (Ruipérez-Valiente et al 2020 ). Professors should be able to select OERs based on quality of the content, interactivity, ease of use, and licensing.…”

The Use of MOOCS in Online Engineering Education

“…Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have entered the educational ecosystem, attracting the attention of government media, businesses, teachers and students, contributing to the wider diffusion and democratization of education around the world. MOOCs have proven to be an effective tool in aspects of open online education [20]. Table 1 shows the world popular MOOC providers.…”

A Video Production Method of Microclass Combined with MOOC

“…In the figure, first, it needs to prepare the video and media materials, open the selected nonlinear video editing software, establish the project engineering file, and set the engineering parameters according to the video course production technical standards; second, it imports the materials into the video and audio tracks for editing and special effects processing [14]; during the editing process, the relevant media materials are inserted according to the content expression needs; after editing the first draft, the instructor and director should preview the video course, analyze and evaluate the video course, and edit the unsatisfied parts again until the desired effect is achieved.…”