Abstract:

This paper describes an efficient way of designing university courses to allow for easy transformation into self-driven MOOC courses and keep participants interested. Despite the significant increase of MOOC offers, the learning engagement and impact fall far below lectures at universities. This is due to several facts, such as a massive number of anonymous participants, low motivation, high dropout rate, difficulty to effectively assess knowledge, the diversity of the learners, and the general organization of the course in a linear sequential order. We tackle these challenges by implementing methods for increasing student engagement (connectivity, socializing, interactive videos), adding layers of constructivism (adaptive and constructive feedback, learning by doing). Furthermore, we re-designed our university courses in a way to be able to efficiently re-use material (micro-modules) in MOOC. Structuring the micro-modules in a 2D-matrix (topic vs depth), we can then adjust the material to create several tailored MOOC, avoiding the possible mismatch of course content and needs of the students. The machine learning group Lulea university of technology (LTU) takes the advantage of the efficiently designed university course to create a MOOC. The MOOC was completed in under two weeks and has attracted over 381 people in three months, with positive responses such as "I just acquired a new job and bring with me tons of inspiration from the course". Analysis of existing course on the FutureLearn platform (AI for tourism) will be conducted at the end to measure engagement, diversity of learners, learning progress, and explain the takeover points while designing the other MOOC called “Computer vision, Image understanding for efficient business and industry”

Keywords:

Self-driven, MOOC, Micro-module management, Constructivism, Engagement.