Kate Dickens

MOOCs: What Motivates the Producers and Participants?

Within the current educational landscape, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have stimulated extensive interest and hype in a short time. It has been asserted that these open courses are no more than a prelude to the disruption that traditional Higher Education Institutions will experience from the growth of on-line education. Meanwhile, institutions are making increasingly significant investments to produce MOOCs, and learners are enthusiastically enrolling in large numbers, often in tens of thousands. The analysis presented identifies a spectrum of motivating factors for universities, and suggests likely areas for future attention and developments. It further identifies a range of motivations for learner participation, which may not be identical across cultures and which MOOC providers might wish to take into account.

Community tools for repurposing learning objects

A critical success factor for the reuse of learning objects is the ease by which they may be repurposed in order to enable reusability in a different teaching context from which they were originally designed. The current generation of tools for creating, storing, describing and locating learning objects are best suited for users with technical expertise. Such tools are an obstacle to teachers who might wish to perform alterations to learning objects in order to make them suitable for their context. In this paper we describe a simple set of tools to enable practitioners to adapt the content of existing learning objects and to store and modify metadata describing the intended teaching context of these learning objects. We are deploying and evaluating these tools within the UK language teaching community.

Finding the Right Tool for the Community: Bringing a Wiki-Type Editor to the World of Reusable Learning Objects

In this paper we present a new approach to enabling pedagogically sound reuse and re-purposing of online learning objects in a community of practice. The lack of specific software for non-technical users inspired the development of an innovative toolkit. The toolkit allows users to edit learning objects collaboratively in a Wiki-type editing environment and to add and modify context-rich metadata which greatly assists in the efficient retrieval of learning objects. The focus of this paper is on the development of the Wiki-type editor which provides an effective way of re-purposing learning objects in disparate communities.

MOOCs for Universities and Learners

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a recent introduction to the palette of educational offerings yet in a short time they have become the subject of massive interest and hype. There are those that predict that these free courses are the first ripple in the coming wave of disruption that the web and on-line education will cause to traditional universities. However University investments in producing MOOCs are increasing exponentially and at the same time learners are enthusiastically registering in their tens of thousands for these courses. This paper describes some research into the motivations for universities to create MOOCs and the motivations of learners in registering and completing them. Our results show a spectrum of motivations for universities, and the need for individual universities to be clear of where they sit in that spectrum. For students we see that motivations can vary significantly across cultures.