Abstract:

Despite the traditional education supporters’ warning about the low quality of online learning, the number of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is rapidly growing each year. Nowadays MOOCs are becoming the most available and effective instrument for life-long learning, getting increasingly more spread both in the sphere of supplementary vocational education and in the higher education system. The research aims to examine how the existing educational system and the society influence structural and qualitative parameters of the open online education. The authors analyse the cases of Ural Federal University (Russia) in the area of creating MOOCs for the Russian National Open Education Platform and applying them in the educational process.

The following factors restrain the inclusion of open online learning in the university educational process: lack of regulatory environment in education; lack of mature models for implementing MOOCs in the educational process and lack of students' freedom for choosing their individual learning paths; technological barriers, and distrust of MOOCs’ quality. To overcome these barriers, the open online education development vector needs to consider the realities the educational system and requirements of potential consumers.

The objective is to identify the problem areas in the interaction between traditional and open online education. Working on them will allow to optimize the process of using MOOCs in the university educational process, and to improve its regulatory support. Here we particularly refer to the said "problematicity" as to a potential for developing certain elements of the open education and of the education system in general. This approach requires a flexible research methodology that takes into account the dynamics of both systems and their relationships.

One of these areas is the process of merging open and traditional education, which already takes place due to pedagogical, organizational and economic reasons. Hybrid teaching methods, such as blended learning, are becoming an universal form of learning for both full-time and part-time education. The paper considers the ways of improving online education technologies to enable the students to master professional knowledge under the conditions of limited interaction with the teacher, and takes practical experience of creating massive online courses at Ural Federal University as an example.

Improving the quality of courses and holding the learner's attention while studying an open course is another problem area. Experience has shown that the learners' interest after the first weeks of training falls dramatically. The authors think that the problem can be solved by means of intensifying the interactive component of MOOCs, enhancing the students’ tutorial support, and creating a virtual environment for implementing joint projects, solving practical problems and revising the theoretical material.

The third problem area lies in the issue of recognizing online learning results and transferring them onto the higher education programmes. One of the ways to solve this problem is to create a network of universities offering their students a wide range of online courses within their educational programmes on the basis of mutual confidence in the educational products of partner universities. The article describes the positive networking experience of Russian universities through the National Open Education Platform.

Keywords:

Massive open online courses, higher education system, Open Education Platform, online education technologies.