Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 28

COURSE DESIGN
Highly structured course with two videos to watch each week. The videos could be
watched in the Dorm rooms which is where the students were encouraged to watch
the videos together (or they could watch them on their own). They online students
and the on campus were both encouraged to use the same forum for discussion and
so enabling the merging of the two cohorts.

SUCCESSES
The dialogues were very successful. In particular the MOOC students were highly
engaged and used the forums enthusiastically. This meant that the academic had a
rich base of questions for discussion with the on campus students.

CHALLENGES
The most information about the challenges of this approach to blending the learning
or flipping the classroom came from the World History from 1300 course. They
noticed that the students on campus were uncertain of what the course would be
like and as soon as they knew that they may be watching online materials the
enrolments for the course declined. The students that did remain didn’t always
attend or they tried to ‘strategically’ learn by only reading the transcripts of videos or
speeding them up. They also didn’t participate as actively in the forum discussion
boards and so it was felt that in some instances the experience for the MOOC
students was better than the students on campus.
The outcome of this has been a recognition to not to just ‘flip the classroom’ but to
‘flip the participants’ involved in the learning. This means that the professors and
the students need to reevaluate their whole experience in the classroom, with a
need to reeducate what the classroom and learning is all about.

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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