MOOCs and their impact on academics

Resource type
Authors/contributors
Title
MOOCs and their impact on academics
Abstract
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently become a hot topic in the academic world, launching a wide ranging discussion on a number of issues. In this research, we surveyed academics' awareness, attitudes, perceptions, and experiences of MOOCs. We received responses from 236 academics from 23 countries, who were working in different roles such as teachers, researchers, managers, and pedagogical developers. Participants were invited to answer questions concerning their awareness and attitudes towards MOOCs. For participants with some knowledge of MOOCs, we requested their experiences and their observations of the impact of MOOCS on their students, teaching colleagues, and within their institutions. We found the most common reaction to MOOCs amongst the academics was concern but many were positive about the phenomenon. The academics claimed their students could be motivated to take MOOCs because of flexibility and no cost involved. While many academics were not aware of their students taking a MOOC and had not observed any changes to teaching programs at their institutions because of MOOCs, there was evidence of some activity and future plans for engagement in MOOCs.
Date
November 20, 2014
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of the 14th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research
Place
New York, NY, USA
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Pages
137–145
Series
Koli Calling '14
ISBN
978-1-4503-3065-7
Accessed
2023-04-11
Library Catalog
ACM Digital Library
Citation
Sheard, J., Eckerdal, A., Kinnunen, P., Malmi, L., Nylén, A., & Thota, N. (2014). MOOCs and their impact on academics. Proceedings of the 14th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, 137–145. https://doi.org/10.1145/2674683.2674700