FEATURE Education information Putting on a MOOC


Courses for horses: a MOOC on equine nutrition proved to be a great success


best teachers and their ideas can be an incredible experience. From our perspective, MOOCs are perhaps most useful for students trialling a subject area before making the commitment to pursue higher-level study. ‘MOOCs are no more a threat than other disruptive models and technologies. Distance learning has been around for a long time. MOOCs have proved that there is a huge market for higher education globally and that complex ideas can be spread effectively through online pedagogies. There’s still a need for high- quality academic publishing and resources that support learning and skills development, possibly a greater need. The key to MOOCs becoming a truly mainstream educational phenomenon is access to supporting academic texts and materials.’


MOOCs were the topic of a breakout session at the UKSG conference. The University of Edinburgh was the first university in the UK to run MOOCs and Jo-Anne Murray, senior lecturer in MSc Equine Science at the UK’s University of Edinburgh spoke about her experiences of being an instructor on one of the first. Her MOOC, on equine nutrition, was delivered through Coursera. It, and all the MOOCs, were designed to have very little tutor input and instead foster peer interaction. ‘We did it to raise awareness of our masters programme. Although it was billed as an undergraduate-level course, more than 40 per cent had a degree already,’ she said. She described how the teaching was delivered through video, slides and quizzes, with teaching materials prepared by her and then teaching assistants looking through common questions via a live chat. Assessment was carried out with weekly and final quizzes. Murrey’s MOOC was unusual in that of the 24,000 that signed up, 19,000 were active students and 5,600 remained active until the end; normally MOOC dropout rates are much higher than this. She attributes the higher completion rate than most MOOCs to the very specific subject area and the fact that people who signed up were generally horse owners.


Beyond promotion for the university’s


courses, she says that delivering MOOCs brings other benefits. ‘I learnt some good lessons for other teaching, for example that


22 Research Information JUNE/JULY 2014


people want short videos,’ she said. There were benefits beyond teaching too: ‘It was good for research because we then had 19,000 people with horses that we could survey on issues.’


Murray was joining in the session by Sally-Anne Betteridge, who works for the University of Birmingham, UK and who has signed up to and taken part in a significant number of MOOCs. She shared her personal experiences.


‘I’m not really interested in deep learning; I just want something interesting to watch on lunch break,’ she explained, adding that she tends to pick MOOCs by scrolling through the Coursera website to see what looks interesting.


She explained that she didn’t complete four of the MOOCs she has done for a range of reasons. ‘Sometimes it’s time or sometimes I’ve just not enjoyed them. That’s the beauty of MOOCs,’ she said. ‘Most of the courses had very open sources such as the BBC. Sometimes they had closed academic sources, with presumably some access agreed,’ she said. This did cause problems with some courses. For example she said that she did a MOOC from Canada where the resources were not available outside Canada.’


She also noted that the quality of the videos is mixed and that sometimes she opts to read the transcript instead. In addition, she said that she preferred to discuss things with other students on Twitter than to use online discussion forums.


Shoman of SAGE was also enthusiastic about the potential of MOOCs but she noted some potential limitations: ‘MOOCs are unlikely to replace university degrees but they could be a useful tool to replace textbooks. There are other issues, however. MOOCs are time-bound – they are around for perhaps eight weeks and then disappear – and so this is a challenge for faculty in recommending them to students.’ Meanwhile, Cox of Taylor & Francis, which is also experimenting with MOOCs, provided a more cautious response. ‘MOOCs are an interesting experiment, and we maintain close links with the major providers to better understand what role a publisher can play, if any. Whether they are an opportunity or a threat depends on whom you ask. If a student enrolled on a MOOC wanted to refer to reliable, curated, peer-reviewed content in order to maximise their chances of passing the course with a better grade then they could do worse than refer to published works. ‘But


commercial entities like academic


publishers trying to make significant amounts of money out of something which at its heart is all about democratised, free access to teaching and learning is something of a forlorn hope, in my opinion at least.’


Licensing content


The issue of publishers and authors making money out of content used in MOOCs and similar online courses is something that Tim Bowen, director of academic products & services at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) has been thinking about.


‘Content providers have said to me that the


MOOCs of tomorrow will be both free and paid for tuition. MOOCs had a free vision but then university administrators got involved,’ he said.


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