MOOC for Student Learning and Active Engagement

Introduction

With the advent of web based systems and the high internet speed, Technology Enhanced learning (TEL) is growing rapidly. MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is an emerging online platform for engaging the students from diversified locations in the country. Adaption and implementation of MOOCs is getting more popular in leading universities around the globe. MOOC based online learning platforms such as Coursera, Edx, Udacity, MiriadaX and IITBombayX are gaining the increasing number of student enrollment ratio on every year and for every course. Because of new web based technologies such as cloud computing and big data, the content creation cost of MOOC courses has been reduced, thus allows MOOCs providers to make available their content for free to the learners located anywhere with internet access. Totally Four thousand two hundred MOOC online courses were launched and offered by various MOOC providers from 500 universities in the year 2015, in which 35 million learners participated (Sunar et al, 2016).

Mostly, adults and professionals enroll these courses for learning and certification in a specific field. It induces self-learning through collaborative and engaged course curriculum. Also, it offers the flexibility for the learners to access the course materials from anywhere and anytime using the LMS (Learning Management Systems) such as Moodle, Edmodo, etc. MOOC facilitates the configuration of the personal preferences for the students to decide on what they study and where they have to study (i.e., both on-campus and off-campus). The assignments, quizzes and discussion forums can be created, submitted and evaluated in MOOC in effective manner. Peer review of the submitted assignments can also be done in such systems with results are published online. MOOC definition is represented in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

MOOC definition

(Gore, H, 2014) defines the MOOC with four principles:

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  Massive: Not required to bother on number of registration (with enrolment in some cases exceeding 100,000 students);

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  Open: By exploiting the broadly available Open Educational Resources(OER) and allows open registration (however various MOOCs have pre-requisites, and for fee registrations, examinations or certificates of completion);

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  Online: not required the physical face-to-face participation and attendance; and

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  Course: The concept of a pedagogically designed learning journey.

MOOC is the evolutionary education technology for distance based learning by which several thousands of students can be actively engaged with the common goal. The expertise and knowledge of the teacher can be reached to the highest possible number of students interested in accessing that expertise. MOOC integrates the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources. Usually, MOOC is open to all and can be accessed free of charge, can be certified by the provider technology platform, in recognition of successful completion of the course. The MOOC is open and invitational. Formal registration is required and no one simply wishes to participate is excluded. Participation in a MOOC is emergent, fragmented, diffuse, and diverse. Apart from MOOC, variation of online learning such as BOOCs (Blended Open On- campus Courses) and OOCs (Open Online Courses) are also used.

In India, IIT Bombay initiates the online blended MOOC platform (T10KT project, 2017) for conducting faculty workshops in remote mode. Remote centers are located all over the country and video lectures are delivered using AVIEW (Developed by Amrita University) system. Using Moodle LMS, faculty completes the assignments and quizzes. There were one lakh faculties in engineering colleges participated and get benefited in these online courses.