The Massive Open Online Course came out as a response to the challenges faced by organizations and branched out disciplines in a time of information overload. A school usually provides you access to a qualified instructor, a library, and other people interested in the course to interact with. MOOC is built in the same spirit, the only difference being that it exists in the digital world and helps you learn through a staggering amount of information online.
MOOC is a course which is open for everyone and participatory. It is distributed worldwide as long as you have an internet connection and it is a way of life-long networked learning. Quite like courses in a university program, MOOC has facilitators, course material, participants, and a start and end date. It is not just an online course; it is, more importantly, an event where people interested about a particular topic get together, discuss, and learn more about it in a structured way.
MOOC is redefining education and e-learning. With total course enrollments crossing millions across major MOOC platforms, such as EdX, Udacity, Coursera, etc., continuing education units are also looking into developing MOOC and are looking forward to hire magento developer. Magento Development Outsource Company has had major success in developing MOOC courses and have shared their promising tips for developing MOOC below:
- Planning ahead is crucial – You must be very clear about your objectives for the course and how you want to achieve them.
- Test your course on the platform before going live – Having in-depth knowledge about the workings of the platform are essential to ensure that the course works smoothly for the students. Once you go live and share the link of your course on social media sites, the platform may experience problems because so many people will be accessing the course material at the same time. Therefore, it is important to test for these things before going live.
- Form a team of experts and distribute work among them – You need much more than just an instructor to run MOOC courses. You need a course designer who shapes the teaching method and decides the course material. You need videographers and video editors to capture the best parts of the course. You need data analysts who collect and study the course learning data. You need ITC consultants to help faculty members and students make best use of the technology and understand the platform. You need teaching assistants who help the instructor manage and answer student queries.
- Constantly improve your course – by analyzing student behavior and questions. Try to find out what are their learning objectives from the course and which parts of the course are giving them a hard time.
- Manage the MOOC – the moment your course goes live, participants will start engaging with the platform and each other. Discussion forums will need to be moderated and other activities will require your attention. Communication channels and contact people need to be active particularly at this point. Make sure educators are responsively providing feedback to participant’s questions, queries, and taking part in their debates.
- Partake in the learning. MOOC is all about exploring and experimenting without bounds. That goes for MOOC developers as well. Keep on trying out new tools and ways to improve your courses and providing an enhanced learning experience to the participants of your courses.
- Debrief the MOOC – it’s essential to constantly monitor the progress and effectiveness of the MOOC. Provider of the MOOC can communicate enrollment numbers which will inform institutions of various metrics, such as demographics, course completion rate, and, length of time spent in the course, etc. This data can be compared with data from other similar course and be eventually used to make the course more useful and productive for the participants. Analyzing these metrics is also important for designing more successful courses in the future.
MOOC has recently seen great success in the world of education and academics because of its practicality and easy availability. More and more people are turning to MOOC because it lets the participants choose what to do, how they contribute and participate in the MOOC, and evaluate on their own how successful they have been in the course. Not only are these characteristics desired by the students of today but they should also be what the teachers and educators strive to deliver.
