Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 14

2.3 PEDAGOGY OF MOOCS
Throughout the literature and commentary on MOOCs, one of the key points of
discussion is around pedagogy (or lack thereof). Online learning has been seen as
the poor relation, a substandard version of a face to face campus based course, but
online learning can enhance and have a better outcome in some cases than a
regular campus based course (Association for Learning Technology , 2010; Higher
Education Funding Council for England, 2009). If this could be applied to MOOCs in
scalable fashion then, arguably, education for the masses could occur. However,
despite knowing that online learning has produced better outcomes, MOOCs still
have received rather bad press over issues of quality and outcomes. Attrition rates
are notoriously high and issues around assessment and plagiarism have been
circulating (Vardi, 2012) argues that academics have ‘ignored pedagogy’, despite
noting that there has been widely circulated accounts of more active classroom
learning and that they haven’t applied principles of effective pedagogy to their on
campus classes. He then goes on to state that despite what we ۛ