Abstract:

In the modern world online learning has become ever more important and this trend has been accompanied by the phenomenon of massive open online courses (MOOC) which are offered by most well recognized world universities. At the Palacky University in Olomouc we are also following this trend and plan to prepare some of these courses for a wide range of possible participants. At the beginning of our efforts we researched the interest of ordinary people in MOOC and we realised that there are two key questions which must be answered before we start preparing the courses. The first question was about the willingness of people to take part in MOOC and whether this willingness is dependent on age or gender. This question is crucial both for deciding which people make up the target group when preparing the courses, and for the further research of fields of interests of potential participants in the courses. The second question dealt with the concrete preferences regarding the themes of online courses. We researched 3857 persons (1949 women) using the questionnaire in which we asked both of the questions mentioned above and also questions about fundamental personal details such as age, education, gender and others. From these 3857 respondents 1684 (43.66 %) were interested in education via online courses. We offered a total of 38 course themes, which were, according to the scientific subject areas, grouped into 6 thematic fields (humanities, religion, social sciences, arts, science & engineering and medicine & healthcare) to those 1684 respondents who expressed their willingness to participate in online learning. After the basic analysis of preferences we also researched the dependence of these preferences on the age and gender of respondents. For the analysis of dependence we used the χ2 test for contingence tables. We documented the dependence of a chosen scientific field on gender in social sciences (preferred predominantly by women) and science & engineering (preferred predominantly by men). We are also able to confirm some dependence between age and scientific fields (arts) but, we were somewhat surprised to find a much lesser dependence between the scientific fields and the age of respondents in general. The complete results and analysis of these findings are published in this paper and we hope they may be of benefit to all MOOC tutors and course designers.

Keywords:

Courses, online, learning, themes, preferences, age, gender.