A MOOC Value Creation Methodology
Initial excitement about MOOCs was largely based on their capacity to recruit 10s of 1000s of participants. The MOOC platforms enabled massive cohorts of participants from outside of the university to engage with university teaching and research and the engagement could be tracked by the platforms themselves. However, it quickly became clear that MOOC participants differed markedly from the profile and patterns of engagement that characterise typical undergraduate students, and measures such as course completion, which might be meaningful for the evaluation of undergraduate courses, were less so in the context of MOOCs. To evaluate the success of a MOOC we need a new way to track the value that participants gain from taking part. Existing evaluation methods tend to focus on quantitative analysis of analytics from the platform, but these measures tell us little about the perceived value to participants. Moreover, since many MOOC participants are professionals, such as teachers or healthcare workers, and are undertaking continual professional development in MOOCs, we also need to track how they use their learning to impact the lives of others, such as students or patients, or in their own professional development activities, which can present challenges for evaluation.
In this presentation Eileen Kennedy and Diana Laurillard will consider a mixed method approach that carefully examines different sources of evidence to show different types of value created on a MOOC. They present a MOOC value creation framework that can be used with the full range of professional development courses, to give a more rounded evaluation of the impact of MOOC initiatives.
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