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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) first appeared in 2008, when ‘CCK08: Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’ took place with 2,200 participants worldwide. However, the “invasion of the MOOCs” (Krause, 2014) was identified four years later, with the establishment of American MOOC providers Udacity, Coursera and edX in 2012 – coined ‘the Year of the MOOC’ in a now notorious New York Times article (Pappano, 2012). Since then MOOCs have spread further with the UK’s FutureLearn joining the scene in 2013.
MOOCs today can take a number of forms, and cover an enormous range of topics. Amongst the plethora of MOOCs, a number are devoted to English language teaching; this is hardly surprising given the enormous demand for English language worldwide. Of these, a number are in the area of EAP and academic writing. One such Academic Writing MOOC set up by a UK University, called ‘A beginners guide to writing for university study’, started in early 2014 (see Furneaux, Wright, & Wilding, 2018, for an analysis of the issues and challenges faced by the MOOC’s designers and teachers). This MOOC was specifically designed as a novel form of content+skills style, aimed at intermediate-proficiency international students thinking about coming to study in the UK; the course aimed to offer both awareness of, and practice in, good academic writing, which many international students can find challenging (Furneaux, 2018; Hyland, 2003). The MOOC’s fifth, and largest, iteration in September 2015 had over 41,000 enrolments, making it the most successful of any of the University’s MOOCs in terms of recruitment. To date there have been 11 iterations, with a total of 269,138 registered participants.
Such levels of take-up on this MOOC, and increasing provision of MOOCs generally (Ash, 2020), indicate success at some level with regard to what MOOCs aim to provide. However, it can be a matter of debate a) how different styles of MOOC lead to clearly identified outcomes, especially for skills-related learning as aimed for here, and b) how to define MOOC success (Krause, 2014; Liyanagunawardena, Parslow, & Williams, 2017), particularly how far it is pedagogically feasible or desirable to set objective learning outcomes within the MOOC framework that students should “achieve” in order to demonstrate success. Given the explosion of demand for online learning and teaching in the current context of the COVID-19 global pandemic, exploring student experiences of learning via MOOCs, is of added significance.
This study’s objectives were thus to explore what success meant to the students on the newer style of Academic Writing MOOC reported on here, by exploring their reported experiences through a thematic analysis of online comments written up as an overall self-evaluation of progress, which formed the final activity in the MOOC course programme. The research questions aimed to identify key themes arising from the student evaluations at the end of the MOOC; to find out if student responses were linked more clearly to either content or process or both; to evaluate the extent of student comments on the degree of feedback and guidance; and finally, to see if other themes could be identified that illuminated students’ responses to the mixed content/process design of this MOOC.