Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 39

WHAT WAS THE IMPACT OF BLENDED LEARNING USING MOOCS?
Throughout this case study, the greatest impact was that the students enjoyed their
classes, they liked the use of materials to support their own classes. This was not
the same mode of use as the other MOOCs (the MOOC was an external MOOC)
but the impact here was that it saved time for the academic to be able to use other
high quality course materials. The MOOC platform played a part in that time was
saved through using the tools within the platform.
There was also a change in the perception of being part of a community which has
inspired enthusiasm and vigor back into the classes.

5.5 Themes
There were three themes that became apparent from the analysis: Performance,
Support and Change. Each of these has been discussed here with references to
quotes from the transcribed data. They also include to which case study the
examples are from to provide context. Interestingly, the theme of ‘Change’ was the
most apparent from the literature review.

5.5.1 PERFORMANCE
There was a clear theme throughout each case study. Both in terms of the
performance of staff and students. The performance of the academic staff was
reported to have altered in that they were trying out new forms of teaching,
becoming more active in the classrooms and adapting and reviewing materials more
for education than they did as a direct result of having the opportunity to try out new
ideas via the MOOCs. The use of active learning is prevalent as a consequence of
the learning design applied to the courses which were either modified (Case Study
4) through to a complete redesign (Case Study 3). There are mentions of ‘Flipped
Classroom’ techniques (Zappe, Leicht, Messner, Litzinger, & Lee, 2009) which
enabled the class time to become much more interactive and stimulating. Again the
suggestion being that this was not the ‘norm’ for any of their face to face classes.
“I could have some very meaningful, thought provoking interesting
discussions and interesting class periods where we can go much further and much
faster than we could ever have gone in this class before.” (Case Study 3, Rixner).

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

39