Abstract:

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) constitute one of the most innovative movements within open learning and distance education. As they are constantly evolving they create new learning opportunities in higher education. However, there exist no consolidated approaches regarding the educational material development, the course curriculum development and the course implementation. Therefore, good practices used in several widespread MOOCs, can be followed and adjusted to different demands and needs of each new course and support designers and academic staff during the design, development and implementation process. Towards this direction, a study was conducted with the aim to create MOOCs guidelines based on best practices on three major categories: the educational material which describe guidelines in order to design and develop suitable educational material, the course curriculum concerning MOOCs structure and configuration and course implementation which include guidelines referring to learners support throughout the educational process. For the aforementioned study practices used by popular MOOCs such as Coursera, FutureLearn, Udemy, Udacity, edΧ and Ιversity were investigated and emulated. The resulting guidelines have been used by designers and academic staff to design four MOOCs of Computer Science Course of the Hellenic Open University (HOU) using EAP-MOOC, a MOOC platform developed based on the Open platform edX. The next step is to escalate the use of MOOCs, relying on the guidelines, in additional educational fields of the HOU.

Keywords:

MOOCs, open learning, distance education, best practices.