Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | страница 41

(McFarland) mentions how their course has over 60 videos with a vast amount of
planning to ensure that they didn’t have to purchase expensive books. This
benefitted the on campus students enormously. Although he also mentions that this
can have a negative effect on the students as they are ‘strategically learning’. The
on campus students are not reading, but watching the videos instead. He also
notes that there needs to be consideration for those not familiar with online learning
and that support for that needs to be factored into the course design. Case study 3
(Rixner) comments on how they created Videos for their own students to be used as
textbooks within the course and how they worked hard at setting up strong support
for their teaching.
“… that we can have these interesting small groups and I can focus on the individual
needs of the students and ended up in a much better and much more interesting
classroom experience for both myself and the students.” (Case study 3, Rixner).
Scaffolding classes using the MOOC or ‘wrapping’ the MOOC around a course as a
tool for enhance the on campus class delivery was a feature of Case study 4
(Fisher) This has led to two support related benefits: 1) the students are reporting
positively about the quality of the materials to support their learning and 2) Fisher
reports feeling part of a community and therefore renewed enthusiasm for teaching
“I am more excited about teaching now, I feel that there is a community of teachers.”
(Case study 4, Fisher).
It was not all positive for blended learning. There were disappointments from the
teams that by providing an overabundance of videos and other support materials,
that students on campus were not as prepared as they may have been in previous
iterations of the course. Adapting the courses at Princeton to accommodate MOOC
learners who may not have had the funds for the courses impacted on the on
campus students as they felt that they had got what they needed from the same
resources and were not reading as much as was expected. (Case study 1c) These
same ‘shortcuts’ were applied in a similar way in Case Study 2 (McFarland) where
students watched the closed captions rather than read what was required.
“so I made the lectures super explicit but it had an unintended consequence on the
in class students, in that now they had this text, that really laid everything out
clearly, that they didn't really need to read the required readings as much. So we did
see kind of a drop in the amount of time they spent on the required readings. (Case
study 2 - McFarland)

5.5.3 CHANGE

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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