Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 8

1. INTRODUCTION
As Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continue to evolve and academics and
institutions invest heavily in developing high quality materials for thousands of
‘learners’ it is natural that the focus is moving towards how the outcome of this
investment can benefit students on campus.
MOOCs have been in existence since 2008 in their original ‘connectivist’ form but
the literature on the adapted version, or xMOOCs was really only coming to light
during the time of this investigation. There was an unprecedented amount of interest
into MOOCs from about December 2012, with a wave of attention on MOOCs both
in the US and the UK. A series of institutions in the UK become partners with the
Open Universities Futurelearn platform and UK MOOCs were launched in January
2013 (Haggard, 2013). There is very little peer reviewed research available still on
the use of blended learning with MOOCs, although there has been a considerable
amount of activity through articles and discussion pieces around this area. This was
useful in framing my research to identify if experiences of teaching on MOOCs had
led to changes in approaches to education on campus.
The benefits of blended learning have long been established. Also known as hybrid
learning, as defined as a course that combines online with face to face delivery (of
which a substantial part of online, with reduced face to face elements) (Allen &
Seaman, 2014), has shown to increase student engagement, encourage active
learning, provide flexibility and pedagogical effectiveness (Aycock, Graham, &
Kaleta, 2002). For the purposes of this study, I will refer to this as blended learning.
In more recent times, the United States Education Department produced a metaanalysis covering over one thousand studies of online learning between 1996 and
2008. One particular aspect of their analysis was blended learning, concluding that
there was a statistically significant improvement in learning, as opposed to purely
online or face to face learning (Means, Toyama, Murphy, Bakia, & Jones, 2010).
Where academics have created MOOCs that align with their on campus classes,
blended learning has formed a substantial element of the educational landscape for
their face to face students. Whilst MOOCs are not blended learning courses, the
data that they provide offers an important insight into establishing how learning is
undertaken online, including identifying the positive behaviours and feedback of
those online learners, which can then be applied to the on campus students to
enhance their educational experience.

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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