Teaching and learning with MOOCs: computing academics' perspectives and engagement

Resource type
Authors/contributors
Title
Teaching and learning with MOOCs: computing academics' perspectives and engagement
Abstract
During the past two years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have created wide interest in the academic world raising both enthusiasm for new opportunities for universities and many concerns for the future of university education. The discussion has mainly appeared in non-scientific forums, such as magazine articles, columns and blogs, making it difficult to judge wider opinions within academia. To collect more rigorous data we surveyed teachers, researchers, and academic managers on their opinions and experiences of MOOCs. In this paper, we present our analysis of responses from the computer science academic community (n=137). Their feelings about MOOCs are highly mixed. Content analysis of open-ended questions revealed that the most often mentioned positive aspects included affordances of MOOCs, freedom of time and location for studying, and the possibility to experience teaching from top-level international teachers/experts. The most common negative aspects included concerns about pedagogical designs of MOOCs, assessment practices, and lack of interaction with the teacher. About half the respondents claimed they had not changed their teaching as a result of MOOCs, a small number used MOOCs as learning resources and very few were engaging with MOOCs in any significant way.
Date
June 21, 2014
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education
Place
New York, NY, USA
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Pages
9–14
Series
ITiCSE '14
DOI
10.1145/2591708.2591740
ISBN
978-1-4503-2833-3
Short Title
Teaching and learning with MOOCs
Accessed
2023-04-11
Library Catalog
ACM Digital Library
Citation
Eckerdal, A., Kinnunen, P., Thota, N., Nylén, A., Sheard, J., & Malmi, L. (2014). Teaching and learning with MOOCs: computing academics’ perspectives and engagement. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Innovation & Technology in Computer Science Education, 9–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/2591708.2591740