Using MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) for ...

Citation info: Rozman, Tomislav. 2014. “Using MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) for Blended Learning with Adult Learners in an International Environment.” Independence, no. 60: 16–21.

Using MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) for blended learning with adult learners in an international environment Tomislav Rozman DOBA Faculty of Applied Business and Social Studies Maribor, Slovenia Dr. Tomislav Rozman is a part-time assistant professor at DOBA Faculty Maribor, the biggest on-line faculty in Slovenia, teaching business informatics-related Bachelor and Master’s courses in the International Business Management study programme. He also manages a private consulting company, which develops and delivers online courses for managers. His adult students are autonomous individuals, employed and with established careers. E-mail: teaching assistant (me) performed the practical demonstrations on the usage of programming languages. The target group consisted of traditional university students aged 19-25 from Slovenia, with no employment experience. The students’ motivation was low and we used a very limited set of online learning tools. The learning process depended mostly on the students’ intrinsic motivation, which, in most cases, was not very high. Why was the students’ motivation so low? My personal opinion is that it was due to three factors: 1) they were studying at a public school; 2) they had no employment experience, and 3) my teaching competencies were limited at that time. Despite of my perception of their low motivation, the completion rate in the traditional course was around 75% for the 3rd year of the Bachelor study programme.

Abstract The purpose of this article is to present my experiences with online learning, massive online learning systems and blended teaching methods for international adult learners – and to compare these with traditional learning. The information presented in this article is based on personal experiences and on the analysis of learners’ behaviour in web-based learning management systems. The behaviour of learners was analysed using various parameters such as visiting time, usage time, satisfaction with its practicality, usability and understandability of the e-learning resources. The article could be useful to teachers who are interested in exploring the possibilities of teaching large groups of international adult students using web-based learning management systems and autonomy-focused learning practices. In our case, autonomy means the students are encouraged to learn by themselves with the help of self-study materials and the occasional assistance of a tutor.

Use of online courses in tertiary education Then I moved on to DOBA Faculty, which was a completely new experience. Firstly, the faculty is private and the tuition fee must be paid by the students. Second, the target group is different to that in the school mentioned previously. The majority of the students are already employed, their average age is 37, and they come from Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The learning environment is different too: we use the BlackBoard online learning management system in order to interact with the students. The learning method is completely different to that

Introduction everal years ago, when I took up my post as a teaching assistant at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, my first contact with the students was during the practical courses for computer programming languages. The teaching method we used at this faculty was a traditional one: the lecturer explained the theory and the

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favoured in traditional faculties: students are encouraged towards autonomous self-study and teamwork based on individual and group assignments. The learners are encouraged to use online learning management system (LMS) tools, such as wikis, collaboration forums, chats, video conferences and the like. Analysis of student feedback shows they have chosen the mode of online study because of the time constraints imposed by their professional and family life. They study in the evenings and at night. Although they learn autonomously, the help of the professors and tutors within online LMS is greatly appreciated by them. We can classify this type of learning as closed online learning. The completion rate of DOBA Faculty courses is around 95% for the 2nd year of the master’s course.

MOOC – Massive open online courses are available online, they can accept a large number of learners and usually do not charge tuition fees. They are similar to university courses. The main difference is that they do not tend to offer academic accreditation, at the moment, although we expect recognition of MOOCs for academic credits soon. Because these courses are attended by such large numbers of learners, the course provider is usually not able to deal with each learner individually; therefore the course has to be designed so as to enable self-study of the course content. Moreover, these courses are organised in such a way that learners can form study groups, interact with each other and actually learn from each other. What are the differences between MOOCs and distance-based learning (web-based, video tapes, books, etc.)? First of all, there is the interactivity of the course – learners use both synchronous and asynchronous channels for the purposes of communication (forums, chats, video conferencing – e.g. Google Hangouts). Moreover, the courses are designed with entertainment (gamification!) in mind. Third, social networking is usually integrated in the courses. For example, study groups are formed within the MOOC platform, Facebook or another platform and networking therefore forms a very important element in the course. Some studies suggest that the feeling of being included in the study group reduces the probability of dropping out (Pappano, 2012).

Massive Online Open Courses for international learners The third experience comes from my consulting and training company, where we offer massive online courses to the potential student market. These are mostly closed (fee required), but several times per year we open some of the courses for free access. Courses, which are opened to the public, are co-financed by EU Lifelong learning programmes (Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus or similar). These courses are targeted at managers or people who are seeking management-related knowledge. Usually, the participants on our online courses are employees from various EU countries, who have established careers and are looking for additional knowledge or updating of their existing knowledge. We offer courses under the umbrella of ECQA (European Certification and Qualification organization, www.ecqa.org), which brings together training and exam organizations from all over the EU (Korsaa et al., 2012). We provide courses such as: Business Process Management, EU Project Management, Software Improvement Management, Innovation Management, E-Learning Management, Social Responsibility Management, Lean Six Sigma etc. Our online courses serve as an add-on to traditional courses for students who cannot attend them in person for various reasons, be it price, lack of time, or unavailability of the course in their location. When participants finish the course, an EU valid certificate can be obtained upon passing the online exam. In the next section, our view of MOOCs will be presented, along with a description of the design and execution of one such course.

Examples of MOOCs The year 2012 was a turning point for word’s most known MOOC providers and the number of learners rose sharply. For example: edX (www.edx.org) registered 370,000 learners in 2012, Coursera (www.coursera.org) 1.7 million, and Udacity (www.udacity.com) 170,000 for one course (Pappano, 2012). Details of other MOOC providers (Open2Study, Wuop, OpenupEd,) can be found in one of the MOOC directories, such as www.moocs.co or www.mooc-list.com. What is intriguing about MOOCs is their outreach. For example, Professor Ragib Hasan (UAB, 2013) reports that he established a course platform (Shikkhok) in Bangladesh in the Bengali language with only 15$. It reached 100,000 students, who live in poverty, and over 2,000,000 lectures were delivered. Those large numbers and experiences of educators (Levinson, 2013) suggest that the the lack of proximity to the learners and of contact with the lecturers could be a problem.

What are MOOCs?

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• (C)ourse: What does it mean? Is it selfpaced? Are participants awarded credits? What is the role of the instructor? What is the community? Is the assessment automatic? In our case, the course was not completely selfpaced (the schedule was prescribed), the assessment was not automatic and for building the community, a LinkedIn group was used.

How our course relates to MOOCs This absence/lack of contact with the lecturer was also the reason why we tried to design an open course with a much smaller group than those mentioned above. Our target group size was 100 – 200 enrolled learners, which is manageable with five to seven tutors. The course length was 6 weeks; it was carried out in October and November 2013 and covered the topic ‘Business Process Management in Higher Education institutions’ (Rozman & Geder, 2012). The course was prepared by 7 international partners from Slovenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Ireland, Lithuania and Poland. We used a modified version of Moodle as a learning management system. Our learners were employees from various higher education institutions and private educational institutions in the EU and 2 from Dubai, UAE. The profile of our attendees was: professors, management and administrative staff, teachers and some post-graduate students and consultants. The assignments (case studies) were not assessed online by an automatic grader, but by a teacher. If we had had a larger number of participants on the course, we would have used some kind of multiple choice test, which could be automatically graded by the LMS. In that case, we would not have been able to trigger individual thinking and application of the acquired knowledge to the participants’ specific situations. How does our course reflect the properties of a MOOC ? • (M)assive: What does it mean? 100 learners? 1000? More? In our case, the average number of learners is 150. The emphasis is on scalability: it should be possible to upscale or downscale the MOOC. • (O)pen: What does it mean? Open access? Free of charge? Open content? In our case, it means a combination: closed access and open access (at the time of co-financed EU project). The content itself is not open (closed license) • (O)nline: What does it mean? Available to anyone? Real-time interaction? Always available? In our case, the course was available online for anyone, anywhere in the world, for 2 months. It was open until the end of the co-financed project and is now available for a fee, because even though it is designed as a selfstudy course, the costs of web hosting, maintenance, tutoring etc. must be met.

Learners’ involvement and their autonomy The course provided various types of materials for studying: live webinars, presentation slides with student notes, recordings of narrated introductions to the learning modules, webinar recordings, discussion forums and additional literature. At the beginning of each week, a different tutor (“tutor of the week”) ran the webinar using the GotoMeeting tool and usually 30 – 50 learners participated. Next, the tutor posted a weekly assignment text in the weekly discussion forum. Learners studied the materials and posted answers to the forum. The tutor facilitated the discussion by asking further detailed questions about the learner’s ideas. At the end, the learners were required to compile their answers into a coherent case study entitled: ‘Business Process Management in my education institution’. As the learners were able to see each other’s answers, they learned from each other and improved their final assignment based on other people’s input. The case study was graded by the tutor of the week. Learners exercised autonomy in the following ways: 1) they could study materials whenever they wanted (within a week [Figure 1]), 2) tutors provided constant support based on the level of previous knowledge and guided each participant to the final assignment, and 3) they peer-assessed the work of others and their work was peer-assessed, offering them extra perspectives on the subject-matter and their knowledge gain and enabling them to exercise useful skills.

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Figure 4. Access to the training material by weekly learning units Figure 4 shows the number of times that the training materials were accessed, according to learning units. Again, we see a similar pattern – a drop in activity over time. The same drop in activity has been detected in a similar research study (Waard, Abajian, Hogue, & Gallagher, 2011). Based on these observations, we can divide the learners into the following categories:

Figure 1. Course schedule

• Lurking participants These participants registered for the course, maybe browsed the materials a bit, but were not otherwise active. Reasons for dropping out early could be various: lack of interest in the topic, low motivation for learning, different expectations of the course content. We have tried several times and repeated invitations to re-activate those participants, but to no avail.

We have analysed various parameters in our online course: activity and usage time, satisfaction with the practicality, usability and understandability of the e-learning resources, and retention rate.

• Moderately active participants Those participants were active, but a daily “dose” of motivation from our tutors was needed to keep them focused. The tutors initiated and moderated the discussions in the course forum, ran the webinar and prepared the instructions for homework. Moderately active participants regularly submitted their assignments and were active in forums, but a minority of them were constantly overdue with their tasks. Nevertheless, almost all of them successfully submitted the final assignment (case study) and received the certificate (30).

Figure 2. Number of posts over time Figure 2 shows the number of posts in the forum dropped over time. The graph shows some periodic spikes. These spikes were detected at the beginning of each week, when a new tutor took over the course and initiated a new discussion.

• Particularly active participants Those participants (around 10%) excelled in their activities. They submitted additional assignments which were not required; they guided other learners and constantly shared their knowledge with other participants. Their activity occupied the tutors more than that of the moderately active participants. Without them, the perceived value of the course for other participants and the tutors would not have been as high.

Figure 3. Participant activity over time Figure 3 shows the number of times all learning materials were viewed and how it dropped over time too. Spikes appear at the same times as in the previous graph.

Summary

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Using an open online course was a new experience for us and we (course designers) have gained many new insights into this novel approach to learning. We have attracted a broad population and reached people who could not otherwise have attended our course. The participants had very different backgrounds and levels of knowledge. Moreover, we achieved a higher retention and completion rate (25%) than other MOOCs (7-9% reported by Coursera), which is a success. but, the cost of achieving greater completion rates is quite high: constant involvement of tutors, regular (daily!) motivation of the learners, providing five live webinars with the possibility of real time interaction and offering the possibility of obtaining the certificate by preparing a case study. Unfortunately, we were unable to avoid a drop in learner activity over time. The varying levels of the learners’ previous knowledge required much more active involvement of the tutors than had initially been planned. We had some technical problems with ensuring the constant online availability of the course. Each week we posted a video lecture which was downloaded by many users at the same time, which caused slow or no access at all to our course content. For this reason, elastic cloud-based LMSs would probably have been a better alternative for a learning platform. The strong point of a cloud server infrastructure is that the processing power throughput and the disk storage can be increased on demand – while LMS is running. Providers of such server infrastructures (like Amazon) possess large groups of servers, whose resources can be dedicated as required to the users who need their services temporarily. This means we can buy the servers’ processing power for the peak times of LMS usage; thus, reducing the MOOC provider’s bill for hardware infrastructure.

References Korsaa, M., Biro, M., Messnarz, R., Johansen, J., Vohwinkel, D., Nevalainen, R., & Schweigert, T. (2012). The SPI manifesto and the ECQA SPI manager certification scheme. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 24, 525–540. doi:10.1002/smr.502 Levinson, M. (2013). Where MOOCs Miss the Mark: The Student-Teacher Relationship | Edutopia. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/whereMOOCs-miss-the-mark-matt-levinson Pappano, L. (2012). The Year of the MOOC. The New York Times, pp. 1–7. Retrieved from http://www.edinaschools.org/cms/lib07/ MN01909547/Centricity/Domain/272/Th e Year of the MOOC NY Times.pdf Rozman, T., & Geder, M. (2012). Procesno usmerjeno vodenje visokoš olskih ustanov Process-oriented management of higher education institutions. Mednarodno Inovativno Poslovanje. Retrieved from http://www.worldcat.org/title/procesnousmerjeno-vodenje-visokosolskihustanov-process-oriented-managementof-higher-educationinstitutions/oclc/813654673&referer=bri ef_results UAB. (2013). UAB researcher’s work in Asia wins Google RISE Award. Retrieved from http://www.uab.edu/news/latest/item/3 185-uab-researchers-work-in-asia-winsgoogle-rise-award Waard, I. De, Abajian, S. C., Hogue, R., & Gallagher, M. S. (2011). Exploring the MOOC format as a pedagogical approach for mLearning. In mLearn 2011 (pp. 138– 148). Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/70517083/E xploring-the-MOOC-Format-as-aPedagogical-Approach-for-mLearning

In conclusion, the majority of the feedback received from the learners can be summed up in a single response: “very well designed and planned course materials”. This fact motivated the development team to go on and open more, similar courses to the public.

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