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Concept of Massive Open Online Course:Expand the Horizon of the Visible
Jingjing LinUniversità della Svizzera italiana
What is the problem?
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MOOC is a girl dressed like
me.MOOC is a man
tough like me.
Why is it so hard to define “MOOC”?
• Proliferation of platforms• Diversity of MOOCs• An emerging field with the futuristic trend
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Why is it needed to define MOOC?
• Prior to a careful scientific research plan, it is critical to define the involved concepts so that “a system of propositions capable of explaining a finite amount of phenomena” (McLeod & Pan, 2005, p.26) can be developed.
• A concept is defined as “abstractions communicated by words or other signs that refer to common properties among phenomena” (Singleton Jr & Straits, 1999, p.554).
• The effort to define MOOC as a trendy concept will benefit both research and practice fields by proposing a better understanding of the concept into its essence, characteristics, propositions, and other core values.
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Highlights of this study
• A review of 84 publications (2008-2016) and use inductive content analysis to investigate the MOOC definition discussed within them
• Tree of MOOC definition discussions (5 generic themes and 16 sub-categories)
• Definitions of MOOCs are mainly discussed in the literature in 5 generic themes:
• Overall role of MOOC• Massive• Open• Online• Course
• Proposed definition of MOOC by this study
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Research purposes
(1) Identify and compare the definitions of MOOC in the literature
(2) Propose a tentative concept of MOOC based on the results of content analysis of existing MOOC definitions.
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Literature review
Divided in three parts:• Antecedents of MOOC• cMOOC, xMOOC and MOOC alike• Pioneers’ ideas of MOOC
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Table 1. Intertwined development of distance education and technologies
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Fig. 1. A hierarchy of MOOC and its ancestors
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It is a course, open, participatory, distributed, and supporting life-long networked learning.
Dave Cormier
2008
MOOC is related to the big data to provide learning analytics, and global class with international participants.
Bryan Alexander
2008
It is a phenomenon with social networks, expert, online open access resources, mass number of students, self-organized participation, no fees, no prerequisite.
George Siemens
2008
CCK08
2,200participants
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Methodology
Purposefully sampled a total of 84 literature items from ScienceDirect, Wiley Online Library, ProQuest sociology database, Google Scholar.
Word frequency analysis
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Inductive content analysis
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1. Open coding 2. Coding sheet
3. Grouping 4. Categorization & Abstraction
Results and discussions
Generic category # of Sub-categoryOverall role of MOOC 6Massive 2Open 3Online 2Course 3
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USIFig. 4. MOOC concept tree grounded in 84 literature
MOOC definition proposed by this study
The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a medium of distance education mainly achieved by self-regulated learning and social interaction, initiated from the effort of open education, with the support of diversified digital media, internet, and personal electronic devices to reach the purpose of global mass education for free.
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Massive
“massive” is considered more as a term that is purpose-driven rather than result-driven. It conveys the trendy educational purpose of cultivating the global mass education to encourage life-long learning among people.
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Open
“open” represents the scope of open education, which aims to break the barriers set by time, space, copyright, technology, formal prerequisites, etc. It is part of the open movement.
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Online
It is a whole idea of digitalizing the contents and sharing them via internet to different receivers enabled by various device types.
(1) the digital media, which is created, viewed, distributed, modified and preserved on digital electronics devices
(2) the internet or web, which is the global computer network to link multiple devices worldwide
(3) the personal electronic devices, including computer, laptop, mobile device (such as mobile phone and touch pad).
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Course
“course” becomes a term to describe MOOC as a newly developed delivery method of distance education, which to some degree still holds the shape of regular in presence course. However, it emphasizes the importance of self-regulated learning and social interactions in the achievement of this educational delivery format.
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Conclusion
• This study reviewed the literature to search for MOOC concept discussions and conducted inductive content analysis in them to abstract patterned ideas behind such discussions.
• The tree of the MOOC concept discussions in the literature formulated the ground for the definition proposed in this study.
• It can provide researchers, practitioners, and policy makers with a common understanding on the background, history, development, and in particular the provisional definition of the Massive Open Online Course to guide the ongoing development of this research field.
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Limitations
• All the literature items are in English only. • The timeframe for conducting this study is
restricted to a certain short period. • The sampling method has ensured a quite
extensive coverage of relevant literature; however, it still cannot encompass all.
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Future work
• More review work can be conducted in the publications of different languages other than English.
• The purposeful sampling technique is applied based on the limited resources provided by USI library, which may be applied to a bigger online database to get a more inclusive results of publications.
• Multiple coders are suggested to avoid possible subjectivity in the research and increase the coherence of coding when using the inductive content analysis.
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