Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 9

My own interest in this area is based on my role as an Education Developer for the
University of Southampton. Part of my role is to look for trends in education and
identify how they can be used to enhance the educational offer at the University. I
am based in the Centre for Innovation in Technologies and Education (CITE) I have
been ideally placed to investigate how MOOCs might be able to contribute to our on
campus staff and student enrichment. CITE is also offering MOOCs for the first time
with the UK partner Futurelearn and I have been able to work alongside those
involved in developing the MOOCs. In addition, I hold the nationally focused role of
the Chair of the special interest group on MOOCs for the Association of Technology
(ALT).
My attention was drawn to the MOOCs arena as a possible means of introducing
academic staff to use technology within their own teaching and I was especially
interested in how Coursera were using their platform to bring together data on how
thousands of their ‘learners’ were learning (Koller, What we are learning from online
education, 2012b). In particular, I was interested in how educational theory was
being applied in combination with this data to enhance their online courses (Koller,
2012a).
This study will investigate through thematic analysis and case studies (Yin, 2009),
how some academics are using MOOCs to enhance their on campus education and
to what extent this has impacted their experiences. Theories that have informed this
research include, Constructivism, Social Learning Theory, Collaborative Learning
and Behaviourism. In order to manage the influx of news, blogs, and other research
materials around the topic area of MOOCs, social media was used to gather
resources and curate annotated content with thematic codes. (Appendix 1).
Because of the time limits, available resources and immature nature of the MOOC
phenomenon for on campus teaching, the scope of this study has been limited to
analyzing secondary data sources. For clarification MOOC students are referred to
as ‘learners’ and mentions of ‘students’ refer to on campus students. The results
therefore can only be taken as an indication of the nature of engagement with
MOOCs for blended learning.

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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