At a Glance!

6 best practices when developing MOOCs

MOOCsFrom an instructional design perspective, the design of a MOOC should include, but not be limited to, the following principles:

  1. Personalised and adaptive learning: Regarded as tailored education to learners’ current situation, characteristics, and needs in order to help them to achieve the best possible learning progress and outcomes.
  2. Authentic and process-oriented assessments: Assessments embedded in real-world contexts, such as the integration of authentic tasks and competence-based assessments, are critical elements for designing highly engaging MOOCs.
  3. Active learning: Allowing the learners to engage in learning and teaching activities, to take responsibility for their own learning, and to establish relevant competences by analysing, synthesizing, and evaluating.
  4. Intelligent and timely feedback: Enabling student success through feedback which should recognise the motivating factors associated with specific learning activities. In addition, it should be targeted to the particular needs of the learner.
  5. Collaborative or social learning: Recognised as pivotal to engaging students, by offering students a sense of belonging to and real connection with a study group.
  6. High production values: Initial empirical research on MOOCs shows that shorter videos (i.e., less than six minutes) are much more engaging. Additionally, tablet drawings and interactive elements in videos increase motivation. However, lecture recordings from classrooms do not qualify for learning materials in MOOCs because face-to-face lectures have a different instructional focus and pedagogical intention.

By Professor Dr. Dirk Ifenthaler, University of Mannheim


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