A contribution to the process of designing for learning in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

• Autor(a) principal: Aracele Garcia de Oliveira Fassbinder
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.11606/T.55.2018.tde-23102018-113518

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) hold the potential to open up educational opportunities and learning experiences to a global audience by combining recent technological advances with technology-enhanced learning. In general, MOOCs are considered online courses that require no prior qualifications for entry, can be accessed by anyone, and attract a diverse audience from a variety of learning and professional backgrounds. However, MOOC teams (including instructors and learning designers, among others) face several challenges when designing for learning in this context. In this work, two main challenges are investigated and approached, namely the lack of well-defined and validated learning design strategies to support practitioners in the MOOC development, and the poor pedagogical design models adopted in MOOCs, which are generally based on traditional classroom formats, such as teacher-centered approaches and content-based learning. Thus, the purpose of this work is to propose a learning design strategy, named Learning Design Framework for MOOCs (LDF4MOOCs), which is grounded on Software Engineering mechanisms and systematic procedures to ensure the standardization and the productivity of all the aspects involved in the MOOC development process. LDF4MOOCs consists of: (i) a MOOC Life Cycle process, which describes fundamental steps to plan, offer, and evaluate a MOOC; (ii) an Educational Design Pattern Language for MOOCs, which is based on problems and recurring solutions to solve the main activities described in the life cycle; and (iii) the related supporting resources. LDF4MOOCs is also pedagogically informed by Flipped Learning ideas, including active learning strategies, self-regulated learning, competency-based design, learner-centered learning, among others. LDF4MOOCs and its elements were evaluated through an experimental study, three case studies, and two expert reviews as internal evaluation methods. Additionally, a field evaluation with educators using the framework as a guide to design their MOOCs was considered as an external evaluation method. The obtained results indicated that LDF4MOOCs has a positive impact on the design for learning in MOOCs, suggesting that our strategy can be effectively applied to support and enhance MOOC development.