Abstract:

In 2008, the worldwide phenomenon of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) appeared as an evolution of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, and from the fundamental principles of connectivism and social constructivism theories. If OER intended primarily open access to education and knowledge for everyone, MOOC take one step further becoming course for an unlimited number of participants. In addition to offering traditional learning resources such as videos, articles and activities, they include forums to help build a community for students, teachers and teaching assistants. Therefore, with their pros and cons we can say that MOOC are a current phenomenon which many people comment about it but for which there are still very few rigorous studies.

This paper presents a study of opinion regarding MOOC by professors of educational technology from the University of Barcelona. As a part of a doctoral thesis, the purpose of this research was to know the different point of views of experts in this field and specifically the perception about MOOC’s benefits and limitations, their own definition on teachers’ functions and tasks in a MOOC and finally, their opinion about its learning assessment.

To collect these opinions an open questionnaire was created and developed from a literature review that guided the dimensions and categories on which the information was collected. These dimensions were the characteristics of MOOC, its advantages and disadvantages, the role of tutors and the role of students’ assessment in these new courses. This instrument was administered online in early 2014 using one of the applications of Google Drive (Google Forms) and finally obtaining 16 responses.

Through a descriptive analysis of the responses obtained on each of the factors, issues and dimensions we highlight among others the democratization of education and MOOC’s commitment to access and openness as an advantage and the value of self-assessment and peer-to-peer assessment as learning assessment systems that would be suitable for use in these new courses. In conclusion, assessment has been, clearly, the element teachers agree the most and it represents a decisive factor for the MOOC to be really considered as a learning modality and not just as a set of resources. This suggests the need to explore viable online assessment systems to ensure Massive Open Online Courses to survive as a possible learning modality in the future.

Keywords:

MOOC, higher education, e-learning, teacher perception, assessment.