Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 42

The overriding experiences covered within these case studies is that of Change.
Change for teaching on campus, change in perceptions of course designs and a
change in roles for the students and the academics.

New ideas for running

classes have appeared as a result of academics teaching on their MOOCs, the
redesign caused
“This class had been taught for about 5 years, before we did this, but in the context
of making the MOOC and flipping the class we pretty much completely reworked the
class and its almost nothing like what it was before.” (Case Study 3, Rixner).
Much of this made possible by the utilization of tools within the platform. Again,
Rixner mentioned that they made a lot of use of the quizzes and the functionality
that allowed for learning outcomes for Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) type
activities (Biggs & Tang, 2007) which is significant considering that these are
computing students used to programming rather than more descriptive types of free
thinking.
“We really liked the Coursera quiz tools we made heavy use of a lot of the features,
randomisation; using random subsets of answers; check boxes where there were
multiple correct answers; single number answers; single word answers and so on.
We even tried to have some very open ended questions which required some
serious thinking, more than writing a programme to get the answer.” (Case study 3,
Rixner)
Case study 1a (Himpele) references the experience of change for teaching, in that
both students and staff needed to re-adjust to active learning. This was referenced
in two sections, firstly for the academics:
“I think there are a number of kinds of flipping that are happening, for me, maybe the
most interesting one is really flipping the professor, flipping faculty into reconceptualising their teaching and the students in a centred way” (Case study
1c, Himpele).
And for the students:
“it’s really the students and the professors that really come to classes with a
personal epistemology that says learning is about obtaining content from an expert
in the field. And they are coming into class with that you can flip the format of the
class, but unless you start work on reframing students and professors in defining
what learning is, then the flipping can be a ‘flopping’.
These are two examples of the change of education as a result of access to the
facilities that MOOC’s provide.

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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