Abstract:

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) became a “buzz word” in online learning since 2012. Many researchers found low completion rates in MOOC courses, yet the MOOC found to provide sound pedagogical model and sometimes higher gains than in a regular face to face classroom. There are many platforms who provide MOOCs; such as Cousera, edX, Udacity, Futurlearn ect. Although it appeared to be having a common pedagogical model in many MOOC platforms, there are aspects which are not common to each other. At the same time due to the demand, numbers of MOOCs are increasing at a high rate. However, not all of the MOOC platforms provide a quality learning experience and even this varies between courses in same platform. Therefore timely it is important to consider quality of a MOOC. Currently the research towards MOOC quality aspects are at considerably low rate and at the same time MOOC quality evaluation frameworks are at proposal stage leaving less empirical results toward MOOC quality aspects. In this research, we as active participants taking the learners perspective, completed 20 courses in 7 platforms while gathering data to evaluate each course on quality aspects. We considered 2 frameworks to evaluate the data against the quality of MOOC. Those are MOOC project EFQUEL and Quality Matters (QM) rubric which was found to be the latest in evaluating quality in MOOC. Our findings reveal that there is a higher quality variation between 20 courses. This implies there is a need of controlling the quality in MOOCs.

Keywords:

MOOC, Evaluation.