Abstract:

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are trending and became the “buzz word” in online learning since 2012. Although cMOOC (Connectivist MOOC) was existed since 2008, xMOOC are becoming more popular while attracting many online students. xMOOCs in particular has common pedagogical features such as small chucked videos, quizzes, peer and self-assessments and forums. Although the design may vary with in the MOOC platform and also among the MOOCs platforms, researchers claim that it provides a sound pedagogical model and at some point reach higher gains in learning than in a face to face classroom. However, it is still sceptical for some researchers, whether the model delivers the knowledge and the skills required to meet the challenges in 21st century. 21st Century skills are defined by many organizations yet commonly agreed upon skills, such as Collaboration, Communication, Creativity and Innovation. Timely we are moving from industrial society to information base society. It is important that students equip with the skills needed in the information base society. At a massive number of enrolments in MOOCs, it is even vital to understand whether participants are gaining the skills required for future challenges. However, currently with the higher rate of emerging MOOCs into the field, it is facing quality challenges. Meeting the 21st century skill requirement is one of the challenges and research works lack towards this direction due to the fact that MOOC is still an emerging phenomena. Nevertheless, our research focused to identify whether the MOOCs are providing the 21st century skills from participants perspective. We conducted a survey using 391 MOOC participants and found that overall 78% of participants believe that MOOCs are lacking to provide the 21st skills. At the same time we conducted 30 semi-structured interviews in order to deepen the analysis. While analysing qualitative and qualitative statistics, we empathize the requirement of designing MOOCs where it will result participants with the not just mastery base skills but with well-timed skills to meet the challenges in 21st century.

Keywords:

MOOC, 21st century skills.