Open Educational Resources - ODL

"Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained significance as a new paradigm in education. MOOCs are open to any interested person and provide education products for a scalable number of learners who have access to the Internet. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in MOOCs including their types, theories and challenges. Although this is an important and challenging field for Information Systems researchers, a rich and structural literature review has not yet been conducted in this area. The purpose of this article is to present a short review of recent research into MOOCs. Thirty-two papers were selected for review through four search engines with a search of key terms related to MOOCs. On the basis of this review, a holistic definition on MOOCs is presented and an overview of the relevant theories and issues is provided."

"While education has been both open and online, the sizeable enrolment numbers associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs) are somewhat unprecedented. In order to gauge the significance of education at scale, this article analyses specific examples of massive participation derived from E-learning and Digital Cultures, a MOOC from the University of Edinburgh in partnership with Coursera. Student-created content, user statistics, and survey data are illustrated to examine the experiences and repercussions of engaging with educational activity where participants number in the tens of thousands. This activity is shown to mirror established instructionist or constructivist approaches to pedagogy. However, rather than working with "massiveness," these positions are suggested to oppose large participant numbers. Concluding remarks propose an irreducible diversity of participation, rather than a generalised categorisation of "student," and call for future considerations of the MOOC to move beyond individualism and self-interest."

"Research suggests that massive open online course (MOOC) students prefer to study in groups, and that social facilitation within the study groups may render the learning of difficult concepts a pleasing experience. We report on a longitudinal study that investigates how co-located study groups watch and study MOOC videos together. The study was conducted with on-campus flipped classroom students. Our subjects reported an overall high satisfaction with the study group style. The research reveals that students like to stay synchronized in the group while watching MOOC videos. However, they have to find a balance between synchronization, video interaction, and the amount of conversation. Watching MOOCs on a shared display addresses the need of synchronicity, and the distribution of control can increase the video interactivities."

"This article presents an empirical study of an open educational course in an online peer-to-peer university (P2PU). P2PU is a nonprofit organization offering free educational opportunities. Focus is on how peers are part of creating course content in a Web 2.0 environment. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have evolved into two different pedagogical directions: content-based xMOOCs and connectivist cMOOCs. cMOOCs emphasizing learning in networks developed informally, where learners are part of creating course content, resemble P2PU`s vision. We investigated processes of interaction in co-creation of tasks in an open educational course and what opportunities and challenges emerge. We employed template analysis for coding data. We report two different processes of interaction between users and organizers: problem identification and co-creation of tasks. This study contributes to understanding a new model of teaching and learning through scrutinizing participation in an open educational course and explores implications for the learning experience."

"Massive open online courses (MOOCs) represent a potentially exciting opportunity to use technology to realise many of the long-promised benefits of universal higher education. While there are many positive aspects to the MOOCs on offer and in development, there are also significant ethical concerns arising from various initiatives. These include the academic duties of care and integrity, commercial exploitation of learners, as well as research ethics concerns arising from the analytical and other work being done by academics and institutions. These issues are explored and a set of heuristics for individuals and institutions provided as a starting point for ethical analysis of MOOCs and associated activities."

"This study examined participants' learning experiences in the context of a six-week massive open online course (MOOC) in journalism with five thousand students from 137 countries. Three research questions were asked: (1) Who are the students and why are they enrolled in this MOOC?, (2) How much time have the students spent in taking this MOOC and have they completed all the assignments?, and, (3) What have they learned and what aspects of this MOOC do the students find most helpful? Four hundred and nine students responded to a survey and forty-four responded to interview questions. The main findings showed 84% of the participants were working professionals and only 28.9% were from a journalism background. Of those who did not complete the course, lack of time was the top reason. Most participants reported a positive learning experience, but lack of feedback and/or poor quality were reported as negative experiences. The discussion forum was the least liked aspect of the course."

"This study examined participants' learning experiences in the context of a six-week massive open online course (MOOC) in journalism with five thousand students from 137 countries. Three research questions were asked: (1) Who are the students and why are they enrolled in this MOOC?, (2) How much time have the students spent in taking this MOOC and have they completed all the assignments?, and, (3) What have they learned and what aspects of this MOOC do the students find most helpful? Four hundred and nine students responded to a survey and forty-four responded to interview questions. The main findings showed 84% of the participants were working professionals and only 28.9% were from a journalism background. Of those who did not complete the course, lack of time was the top reason. Most participants reported a positive learning experience, but lack of feedback and/or poor quality were reported as negative experiences. The discussion forum was the least liked aspect of the course."

"Following the recommendation of the 2012 Paris OER Declaration, promotion and use of OER should aim at widening access to education at all levels, both formal and non-formal, in a perspective of lifelong learning, thus contributing to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education. Given the different kinds of special needs of students with disabilities (physical, sensitive, cognitive), this aim implies a holistic approach to the design, use and reuse of OER. However, this hasn't been the case so far. Standards and guidelines developed so far tend to consider accessibility only in relation to the design of resources. In this paper we discuss how critical it is to ensure OER use and reuse follows guidelines which consider the different types of disabilities and educational aspects involved in an integrated way. In order to assure "equal opportunities" in education, accessibility should have an educational component related to the level of understanding the users may have of the OER content. We submit a proposal for classification which addresses the educational objectives of OER, the difficulty level of understanding of the content of the resource, and the user profile determined by the type of disability in an integrated form."

OER are now becomes a buzz word. The main purpose of the OERs to provide the educational content in digital mode to learners without any cost. Now many universities and authors develops the OERs for the wider audiences. The creators must think about the needs of the users community.So there must be evaluation standards for OERs.

"Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have generated enthusiasm, excitement, and hype worldwide and recently increasing skepticism. They are being broadly discussed in the major news media (and to a smaller extent in academic circles). Rapidly increasing numbers of MOOC providers, MOOC courses and articles, discussion groups, and blogs discussing MOOCs are indicators of the involvement of many stakeholders. Most of these analyses and developments are based on economic perspectives (such as scalability, productivity, and being free) and technology perspectives (including platforms supporting large number of students in online environments, enrichment components such as forums, peer-to-peer learning support, and automatic grading). Few contributions analyze MOOCs from a learning science perspective and put them into a larger context with other approaches to learning and education. This commentary explores challenges derived from the perspective to conceptualize MOOCs as being one component in a rich landscape of learning."

"The current discourse surrounding Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is powerful. Despite their rapid and widespread deployment, research has yet to confirm or refute some of the bold claims rationalizing the popularity and efficacy of these large-scale virtual learning environments. Also, MOOCs' reputed disruptive, game-changing potential for education remains unsubstantiated. A sober counterbalance is needed, in particular, via attending to students' everyday accounts of the complex realities of learning in these massive online courses. This article reports on an exploratory, phenomenological study of the xMOOC learning experience. Our interest was not the xMOOC experience of students in general, but in its singular, lived particularities. What we discovered was a unique and intimate tutorial sphere that seemed to develop for some xMOOC students in the context of the video lectures, an experience sometimes marked by a sense of fandom surround."

"This article presents an empirical study of an open educational course in an online peer-to-peer university (P2PU). P2PU is a nonprofit organization offering free educational opportunities. Focus is on how peers are part of creating course content in a Web 2.0 environment. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have evolved into two different pedagogical directions: content-based xMOOCs and connectivist cMOOCs. cMOOCs emphasizing learning in networks developed informally, where learners are part of creating course content, resemble P2PU`s vision. We investigated processes of interaction in co-creation of tasks in an open educational course and what opportunities and challenges emerge. We employed template analysis for coding data. We report two different processes of interaction between users and organizers: problem identification and co-creation of tasks. This study contributes to understanding a new model of teaching and learning through scrutinizing participation in an open educational course and explores implications for the learning experience."

"Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have generated enthusiasm, excitement, and hype worldwide and recently increasing skepticism. They are being broadly discussed in the major news media (and to a smaller extent in academic circles). Rapidly increasing numbers of MOOC providers, MOOC courses and articles, discussion groups, and blogs discussing MOOCs are indicators of the involvement of many stakeholders. Most of these analyses and developments are based on economic perspectives (such as scalability, productivity, and being free) and technology perspectives (including platforms supporting large number of students in online environments, enrichment components such as forums, peer-to-peer learning support, and automatic grading). Few contributions analyze MOOCs from a learning science perspective and put them into a larger context with other approaches to learning and education. This commentary explores challenges derived from the perspective to conceptualize MOOCs as being one component in a rich landscape of learning."

"Higher education institutions face conflicting challenges; they must equip students with up‑to‑date knowledge in fields in which knowledge is constantly being renewed, while they also need to guide students to examine reality through broad-based observation and consider different scientific disciplines. They operate within different constrictions such as: learning program boundaries, budgetary constrictions, and lack of accessibility to experts in different areas, and the range of courses offered to students is limited. To cope with these constrictions, Ort Braude Academic College of Engineering opened an experimental program. As part of this program, students were allowed to study MOOC courses under the college's supervision, and were eligible for accreditation if they completed the courses successfully. Only 15 out of the 600 students offered the program, registered for these courses. Only seven were accepted for the program. This paper describes the background for the college's decision, the registration process and supervision of students, detailing students' challenges and achievements in the MOOC courses. Students who completed the MOOC courses reported that they enjoyed meaningful learning, requiring serious efforts in comparison to the courses that the MOOC courses replaced. Given this positive feedback by the students, it was decided to continue with the experiment."

MOOC are the online courses for larger audiences. They are provided free of cost learning to masses. MOOC provide effective platform for public education and enhance public knowledge on particular topic.

"This is a critical examination of the claims that innovations such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) will disrupt the business models of the higher education sector. It describes what business models are, analyses the business model of free MOOCs offered by traditional universities and compares that model to that of paid online courses offered by distance teaching universities. The results of the analysis suggest that, in their present form, MOOCs are unlikely to address the challenge of reaching and assisting students from disadvantaged backgrounds and in developing countries. Nevertheless, MOOCs and the buzz surrounding them do signal a threat to the higher education sector, namely the widening gap between the skills of graduates of the educational system and the societal expectations from them."

"Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer many opportunities for research into several topics related to pedagogical methods and student incentives. In the context of over 20 years of online learning research, we discuss lessons to be learned from observational comparisons and experiments on randomly chosen groups of students. We target two MOOCs for our study. We investigate dropout rates and how students who decide to drop out differ from those who continue courses. We discuss class forums and video lectures and how these interactions correlate with achievement. We explore the strong correlation between procrastination and achievement and implications for MOOC design. We examine the role of certifications offered by MOOCs and how different options can affect outcomes. We also examine the potential of linking data across courses. We discuss survey data in the context of these MOOCs. These research opportunities offer big data challenges, which are addressed with parallel computing techniques."

"The true power of comparative research around the impact and use of open educational resources is only just being realised, largely through the work done by the Hewlett-funded OER Research Hub, based at The Open University (UK). Since late 2012, the project has used a combination of surveys, interviews and focus groups to gather data about the use of open educational resources (OER) by educators, formal learners and informal learners across the globe. These data focus on the overall picture emerging from the survey research of the project, which presently comprises more than 6390 responses, 50.3% of which are informal learners, 24.7% of which are formal learners, 21.6% of which are educators and 3.4% of which are librarians. Results from more than 20 individual questionnaires have been compiled, including surveys of K12 and Flipped Learning teachers; college educators from the CCCOER consortium; users of iTunesU, OpenLearn, OpenStax, Saylor, Siyavula and the YouTube channel of The Open University."