Authors: Dr. Aarti Yadav, Ms. Annapurna Madhuri Kadiyala
Institutions: Central University of Haryana, SMIORE Academy for Teacher Training
Country: India
Topic: Technologies for Open Education
Sector: Higher Education
UNESCO Area of Focus: Building capacity
Session Format: Presentation
Abstract
The MOOC offered under OE4BW project to achieve sustainable development goals opened the doors to many educationalists to be a part of the drive to create a better world. The courses are offered under open licences with an intention to promote use of existing open education resources and also encourage creation of quality open access content. Open licensing breaks the economic barrier created by traditional use of expensive copyright learning material. OER culture encapsules the idea of creating a knowledge world based on principles of equity and equality and excellence. The OER developers under OE4BW mentoring programme offered their course for free to students. The sharing of course developers experiences during OE4BW yearly EDUSCOPE programme brought forward several innovative ideas adopted in the course as well as the challenges faced by them related to use of technology, pedagogy, assessment, student retention etc. As a MOOC developer, the need for a platform to understand the students' experiences was realised during course presentation in EDUSCOPE. The present study is conceptualised on the idea of bringing forward the experiences of students regarding their MOOC experience. Their stories provide a rich source of information to help the MOOC creators to design engaging learning environments and overall effective MOOC. The present study attempts to gather the participants' views on online courses offered in India, with special emphasis on MOOC. The study reflects on students' experiences related to course openness, massiveness, degree of communication, collaboration, certification, social inclusion, quality assurance, assessment strategies. The experiences shared by students are instrumental in enhancing the quality of MOOCs . The results provide a glimpse of the strengths and limitations of courses and substantial data to course developers. The study may be utilised by the developers in designing engaging learning experience and also dealing with the other challenges of MOOC creation such as student retention, collaboration , quality assurance and creation of interactive content.Keywords
MOOC, OER, Student’s experience, OE4BW
