CREATING MOOC GUIDELINES BASED ON BEST PRACTICES

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1 CREATING MOOC GUIDELINES BASED ON BEST PRACTICES Natalia Spyropoulou 1, Christos Pierrakeas 1,2, Achilles Kameas 1 1 Educational Content, Methodology and Technology Laboratory (e-comet Lab) Hellenic Open University (HOU), Patras, Greece 2 Dept. of Business Administration, Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Western Greece {nspirop, pierrakeas, kameas}@eap.gr Abstract Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) constitute one of the most innovative movements within open learning and distance education. As they are constantly evolving they create new learning opportunities in higher education. However, there exist no consolidated approaches regarding the educational material development, the course curriculum development and the course implementation. Therefore, good practices used in several widespread MOOCs, can be followed and adjusted to different demands and needs of each new course and support designers and academic staff during the design, development and implementation process. Towards this direction, a study was conducted with the aim to create MOOCs guidelines based on best practices on three major categories: the educational material which describe guidelines in order to design and develop suitable educational material, the course curriculum concerning MOOCs structure and configuration and course implementation which include guidelines referring to learners support throughout the educational process. For the aforementioned study practices used by popular MOOCs such as,, Udacity, edχ and Ιversity were investigated and emulated. The resulting guidelines have been used by designers and academic staff to design four MOOCs of Computer Science Course of the Hellenic Open University (HOU) using EAP-MOOC, a MOOC platform developed based on the Open platform edx. The next step is to escalate the use of MOOCs, relying on the guidelines, in additional educational fields of the HOU. Keywords: MOOCs, open learning, distance education, best practices 1 INTRODUCTION Open learning and distance education, which are constantly evolving in the last decades, present new opportunities within formal and informal education systems. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been one of the most innovative movements within this field. Thus, they create new opportunities for lifelong learning, related to high quality education at no cost [20], beyond time zones and physical boundaries [4]. The adoption of MOOCs in formal education institutions presents major challenges, including co-creation networks within communities and new forms of communication and collaboration for both students and educators [11]. Although MOOCs have been developed in a short duration [20], they are incorporated in higher education with a huge number of students. for example, one of the most widely known MOOC platforms, has more than 2.9 million registered users for more than 328 courses available [19]. Thus, criticism has been raised concerning their influence in the higher education. Moreover, survey results indicate a very high dropout rate of attendance by people who register at MOOCs [12]. The aforementioned results are major causes for additional criticisms regarding the long-term success, impact and sustainability of MOOCs [20]. In particular, a visualization of MOOC completion rates by an educational researcher [10] infers that less than 10% of people who register on a MOOC complete the course and there are almost no information about the experiences of non-completing MOOC participants [13]. Koller and Ng, the creators of Coursera platform, have identified that up to half of the registered Coursera students never actually start their class [9]. The University of Edinburgh, which has launched six MOOCs in collaboration with the platform reported that overcrowding and diversity of participants increases the potential failure of MOOCs, particularly when there is only one model of learning and all students share the same case studies and activities [18]. On another study [6], the results showed that MOOCs attracted mainly adult learners, who were uninterested in the completion of the course and reported lack of time as the main reason for their removal and non-completion of the course. On the other hand, the investigation of

2 Mackness et al., [15], which refers to the pedagogy of a MOOC at the Oxford Brookes University, shows that participants, who completed the course, were able to successfully navigate the platform and the environment. Another interesting feature of the course was the support by previous users of the course, who worked as guiders for the beginners. The research literature is constantly growing, although it still remains limited. Several articles have discussed empirical evidence and results, concerning the effect in higher education and MOOC pedagogy from the learner s side but as mentioned in Liyanagunawardena et al., [13] there is not much research literature regarding MOOCs from the side of creator/institutions or the technological aspects. In addition, there exist no consolidated approaches regarding the educational material development, the course curriculum development and the course implementation. Towards this direction, a study was conducted with the aim to create MOOC guidelines based on best practices on three major categories: the educational material, the course curriculum and course implementation. The resulting guidelines have been used by designers and academic staff to design four MOOCs of Computer Science Course of the Hellenic Open University (HOU) using EAP-MOOC, a MOOC platform developed based on the Open platform edx. The platform development and the design process were supported by the Educational Content, Methodology and Technology Laboratory (e- CoMeT Lab), which supports HOU in applying educational, methodological and technological innovation in distance learning and educational content development. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Follow this introduction; in Section 2 we discuss the steps that were followed to select the best practices. In section 3 we describe the MOOC guidelines based on best practices. In Section 4 we present the implementation of the guidelines for creating MOOCs in EAP-MOOC. Finally, in Section 5 we discuss our conclusions and future work in this field. 2 MOOC BEST PRACTICES The steps followed for the completion of this study were accomplished in 3 phases. At first, the search and selection of MOOC platforms were conducted. On the second phase the categorization of best practices was decided and in the third phase best practices were selected. Currently there are several MOOCs platforms available presenting online courses. This fact has created the need for selecting the most appropriate of them to reflect the applicable basic condition in the best possible way. The selection was made with the help of the google search engine by using keywords such as MOOCs platforms, MOOCs list, MOOCs most popular, MOOCs higher education. The search has led in the recording of 47 MOOCs which are subsequently classified by category (type of education, not or for-profit, university, number of enrollments). Each of the platforms was thoroughly studied both in relation to higher education and in terms of the number of students. Basic concern throughout the duration of the search was to identify platforms from all the available categories and to select the most widespread and prevalent platforms. The above determined the final selection of six MOOCs, which are the following: EdX ( is a not for-profit platform established by Harvard and MIT. Currently it offers Harvard, MIT and Berkeley courses and more than 200 institutions have confirmed interest to join. As of 28 April 2014, edx has more than 2.1 million users in 176 courses online [5]. ( was established in late As of October 2013 had 26 University partners and three non-university partners: the British Museum, the British Council and the British Library. reports that it registered 20,000 students from 158 countries within 24 hours of opening registration [7]. Coursera ( is a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world [1]. It was established by two Stanford professors and has contracts with 33 universities. According to the website, more than two million students participate in Coursera Websites. It has been frequently remarked that the quality of courses offered is very diverse. ( is a for-profit portal that facilitates MOOCs, in the area of entrepreneurship, IT, software use, design, arts and sports. It allows everybody to offer a MOOC, and the website announces that its courses are offered by the world s top experts, including New York Times best-selling authors, CEOs, celebrities, and Ivy League professors.

3 The company's website also states that over 3 million students have taken courses since 2010, and over 16,000 courses are currently available [22]. Udacity ( is a for-profit company that has been cofounded by a Stanford professor in Udacity does not have a university partner although, the website mentions that it keeps close relations with 20 high-tech companies, among them Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter. As of 28 April 2014, Udacity has 1.6 million users in 12 full courses and 26 free courseware [21]. Iversity ( offers MOOCs in higher education in Germany. As opposed to the US-American provider the Iversity platform works together with professors to provide each course. Iversity officially launched online on October 2013, with 24 MOOCs and over 100,000 users [14]. After the final selection of platforms the categorization of best practices was decided in order to give an overall and comprehensive picture of the threads we wanted to seek out. In order to define the main categories of the best practices under investigation we consider that each MOOC is associated with around three main components, namely (A) Course Curriculum Development, (B) Educational Material Development and (C) Implementation. The record of the good practices was carried out, through attending courses and search good practices that creators give on their platforms. In the next section the guidelines based on these good practices are presented. 3 MOOC GUIDELINES BASED ON BEST PRACTICES 3.1 Course Curriculum Development best practices for MOOCs This component involves best practices according the Course Curriculum Development from the selected MOOC platforms. Therefore, we investigate the six platforms concerning the structure, configuration and general characteristics of MOOCs and subsequently we constructed our guidelines. According to the Structure, generally MOOCs courses vary depending on the duration of the course and do not present a general structure. On the six platforms that were investigated the courses are divided into 6-14 sections, which have period of one week each. The duration of the courses varies from 6-14 weeks [7] [14] [1] [5]. In a descriptive name is given for each week, so that students know what to expect during the corresponding week. In addition, learners can navigate to different weeks of the course, allowing information regarding what they will learn or to catch up the course if they had start late. Similarly, the learner s time engagement varies depending on the course. That depends on each course, and the personal choice of the participant. Commonly some of the courses require 2-3 hours, other between 5 and 8 hours a week. According to learner s assessment, in all the platforms the academic staff chooses the instrument for evaluating. Although, projects, quizzes and peer assessments, in which learners are assessed and provide feedback to each other are the most common evaluating methods [1] [14]. Particularly, in literature about the process of peer assessment is given to learners and using a grading rubric score random tasks. In this way, they guide learners to understand the process of scoring [1]. At Udacity, edx and Ivercity the educational videos are available on YouTube video channel of their Universities. Moreover, all of the platforms except from Iversity and, in which it depends on instructor choice, have the educational material available for download in order learners can have access to educational material without internet network. Platform and Educational Material accessibility presents not common characteristics concerning the six platforms. Table 1 illustrates Platform and Educational Material accessibility that were investigated on each platform. Table 1: Platform and Educational Material accessibility on six MOOCs Category Coursera Udacity edχ Ιversity Accessibility (for users with disabilities) Mobile friendly Yes Unofficial applications (app) supported by the creators of the platform. Yes (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0) The platform is suitable for mobile It depends on instructor choice. Official free app for mobile It has not been officially mentioned The platform is suitable for mobile Yes Partially suitable platform for mobile It has not been officially mentioned The platform is suitable for mobile

4 As for the general characteristics, we investigate the six platforms to elicit good practices. It is worth mentioned that enables comments at the bottom of every educational material page, aiming to create discussions among learners, while academic staff coordinates and answer questions [7]. and provide a complete activity button at the end of each activity. This information helps learners to create a list «To do list» to know what activities have left [7], [22]. In addition, all of the platforms provide the ability to display in each student a progress page, which update learners with useful information and data, while there is the possibility to unregister from a course at any time [7][22][1][5][21][14]. Most of the MOOCs exploit popular social networks like Facebook and twitter, with great success and popularity of thousands of users who follow the pages of MOOCs for quick and immediate update [5][1][21]. Based on the above, we create Course Curriculum and Configuration best practices. Changes have been made where demanded in order to be consistent with the homogeneity of HOU standards. For example, Grading Methods used by the selected platforms was amended to those using at HOU. Table 2 presents the categories of course curriculum and configuration best practices and for each category examples are represented with the corresponding literature. Table 2: Course Curriculum and Configuration best practices Category Examples Platform/s Structure The course should be divided into sections that include activities aimed at completing within one week each., Ivercity, Edx, Coursera For each section should be given a descriptive name in order learners are informed on what they are going to learn during the corresponding week. Duration Enrolment dates and deadlines Engagement Time Certification Communicatio n and Collaboration Assessment Download ability Accessibility Each section should contain at least one educational video. Besides video tutorials, a section should contain hypertext, video comprehension questions, exercises / tasks, discussion topic(s) and additional education material. At the beginning of each section, learners should know what activities will be carried, when and why. Educational materials and sections of the course should be visible to registered users even when the courses are completed. Students should be able to navigate in different sections (e.g. weeks) of the course, giving the opportunity to find out what they will learn next. Generally the courses are divided into 6-14 sections, which have a maturity of one week each. The duration of the courses varies from 6-14 weeks. Students should be informed about the enrolments dates and deadlines in the course description page. After the end of the course registered students should be able to enter the course, but should not be option for new enrolments. Recommended time engagement of learners could be between 3-4 hours to 10 hours per week. The information should be occurred in the course description page. Learners after a successful completion of the course obtain a free certificate of attendance, which certify that the participant has successfully completed a course, without confirmation of learner s identity. A Certificate with a verified identity could be provided, by paying a certain fee. Academic staff should encourage learners to support a network of cooperation, with the active participation of all and to exploit the power of community for continuous online support, where everyone has the opportunity to become an instructor and learner. Generally, during a course, the educators undergo a series of evaluations. This can be exercises or a task (which usually comes at the end of the course). The exercises can be open response, multiple choices, gap-filling and matching. It is recommended to have the educational material downloadable The educational material is proposed to be created is compatible with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, so as to maximize learner participation, including learners with disabilities. Udecity Iversity Iversity Coursera, Ivercity, Edx, Ivercity, edx Ιversity edx edx, Udacity, Udacity,, Iversity, edx, Udacity

5 3.2 Educational Material Development best practices for MOOCs The second category includes the Educational Material Development. All of the six platforms are using educational videos at a major part of their courses. ΕdX platform refers videos as learning sequences and consists of 5-10 minutes videos with intermediate self-regulated quizzes with multiple choice questions (edx). Similarly, Udacity uses open answer questions at regular intervals of the video for more complex queries (such as to write code). Moreover, at edx platform optional videos are used as tutorials. These tutorials provide additional videos that resemble recitations concerning useful information. Additionally, the audio that is available with the educational videos include the voice of the instructor guiding the teaching [22]. However, differences occurred at the use of additional educational material. In, documents (e.g. articles) in pdf or hyperlinks are available to learners in each course. On the other hand, at edx, documents with literature to study are given at the courses. Some of the platforms ( Udacity and edx) are also using wikis in order to encourage learners to add additional education material. At Iversity, projects are given to the learners which are evaluated by other students (peer-assessments). Furthermore,, which allows everybody to offer a MOOC, has created a checklist with best practices and standards that, as they mention, will guide creators along the way and every course published on is reviewed and approved based on these standards [23]. Table 2 presents the types of educational material are used by the platforms. Table 3: Types of Educational Material at six MOOCs Platforms Category Coursera Udacity edχ Ιversity Educational Video Quizzes Audio files Documents Presentations files Hypertexts Projects Wikis All of the above obtained in all fieldwork circumstances and as a result we composed guidelines suggesting ways to design and create appropriate educational material for MOOCs. The categorization was made based on the educational types mentioned on Table 3 and each category is divided into subcategories relating to general, technical and educational best practices. Examples can be found in Table 4, showing good practices with the corresponding literature. Table 4: Educational material best practices Category Examples Platform/s Educational Educational videos should be often stopped and ask students to answer a Coursera Video simple question about the content of the video [General] The educational video should be include at least 60% of the educational MOOC material [General] The duration of the videos should be 5 to 20 minutes (depending on the content) [Technical] The File Size should be up to 1 GB [Technical] Presentations should contain photos, charts or/and diagrams [Technical] The video should be clear, 720p or High Definition [Technical] The guidance should be clear, attractive and easy to follow by learners. Also should be including examples for understanding concepts. [Educational] Presentation Hypertext Document The guidance should not only provide information, but also to help learners to apply their learning through interactive activities. [Educational] Presentations should contain useful additional material (e.g. presentation slides, springs, files Zip, resources) [General] Recommended applications to create presentations are: PowerPoint, Keynote, and Prezi [Technical] Combination of elements on each page (if possible), such as text, image without overloading the page [General] Online literature (such as a e-book) should be available in each course.[general] Online articles should be available in each course [General] The available documents / essays of each course should be downloadable. [Technical] edx

6 Audio Quizzes Wiki Projects Video lectures should include audio where the voice of the instructor guides the learners [Technical] Courses should include quizzes to enhance learning in educational activities [General] Feedback should always be included in quizzes [Educational] Quizzes could be used to count the total score of the learners [Educational] Open answer quizzes are recommended to be used, when it is needed (e.g. in programming courses in order to write code) [Educational] Quizzes should be created based on the real- world context to help learners transfer their knowledge in real life [Educational] Using wikis students could be able to submit additional resources and concepts on each course [Educational] Projects are recommended to be assessed by other learners (peer-review) [Educational] Udacity edx Iversity 3.3 Course Implementation best practices for MOOCs The third category includes the implementation. At the implementation of MOOCs, communication and learner s support offered by the educational staff in the large number of students is mostly performed by announcements and news via s and forum discussions. For example, at Udacity the educational staff sends announcements almost every day about the course process or even irrelevant news aiming the learner s interest attraction and their engagement with the course. In addition, in all platforms educational staff creates forum discussions to encourage and involve learners to discussions. At separate discussions are used for technical problems and problems on which the technical department constantly responds and helps when is needed. At edx, one or two times a week, educational staff is online and creates specific discussion, where students can ask and have answered their questions about the course. Additionally, at Coursera platform educational staff holds google hangouts meetings in which learners can ask their questions. The meeting usually is recorded and uploaded at the course in order for the learners to watch it anytime. Social networks are used in all of the platforms to inform their announcements and/ or to collect the learner s queries of each course (usually with the help of hashtags). The good practices were considered and established the guides which are divided into components such as General, , Discussion, Forum and Popular Social Networks best practices. In table 5 examples are presented with the corresponding platform. Table 5: Learners support and Communication best practices Category Examples References General Academic Staff should be available during limited hours a week and indicate the edx level of communication they could have, in order learners be informed when academic staff is available for questions, messages, coaching or feedback. Academic Staff should set clear expectations / requirements for learners edx concerning their response time (ie whether they meets with daily comments, answer questions once a week, sending announcements every day with updates on courses etc). Academic staff should encourage learners to publish in discussion forum and social networks (such as twitter) their opinions, questions and technical issues.,, Discussion Forum Popular Social Networks Technical Staff should provide continuous technical support, answering s and / or messages to respective forum topics related to technical problems. Academic Staff should keep in contact with the learners throughout the educational process at regular basis (either at the beginning of the day, either in the middle or at the end of day). They could send s announcements, news or interesting alternative subjects to enhance learner s participation. Academic and Technical staff should be involved in discussions forums answering questions when it is necessary. Popular Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc., are suggested to be used by academic staff and learners, hence the quick and immediate updating. Academic Staff could publish announcements on Social Networks and learners could use them to inform, publish their questions and discuss. edx,,edx, Iver sity,udacity Udacity,, edx, Coursera edx, Udacity

7 4 APPLYING MOOCS GUIDELINES For the MOOCs creation, a methodology was developed which included all the phases that needed to analyse, design, create, implement and evaluate the MOOCs. The platform, that was used to create the courses, is the EAP-MOOC, which is a MOOC platform developed by the laboratory e-comet of the HOU based on the Open platform edx. Required staff and Management Team were formed with three different groups. The first group is the Course Managers Group (CMG), which is composed by academic staff and teaching assistants. These groups are responsible for the design and creation of the courses and the educational material. Furthermore, these groups are responsible to guide learners throughout the educational process. The second group is the Educational Material and Content Support Group (EMCSG), which consists of Educational Technology Specialists who supports the first group during the creation process. The third group is the Technical Support Group (TSG) which consists of technical personnel who are responsible for the initial configuration of the platform EAP- MOOC and for ongoing technical support to the first group and to the learners. Additional staffs, such as solicitors, responsible staff for the publication/promotion of the course and special multimedia developers were involved. This approach refers to collaborative development of MOOC such as Cross [2] and McCallum et al. [16] with OLDS MOOC and Alpha MOOC proposed. This proposal relies on the concept of learning alongside with the development and testing, where all groups interact to learn during the course creation process [16]. The resulting guidelines have been used to support CMG Groups at the methodology process during analysis, design, development and implementation phases. The MOOCs Guidelines was provided to them, describing (a) the methodology procedure (b) best practices to design MOOCs (Course Curriculum Development best practices for MOOCs) and create educational material (Educational Material Development best practices for MOOCs) and (c) best practices of course implementation and supporting learners during the educational process (Course Implementation best practices for MOOCs). The methodology has been used to design four MOOCs of Computer Science Course of the HOU. The first published MOOC is the course entitled PLI24 - Software Design which purpose is to acquaint students with the principles and tools of software design. At this course, learners come in contact with the basic parts of a compiler and the timing of main projects. The course evaluation focuses on the practical application of knowledge, such as to solve exercises and Java programming. The course is categorized by tree sections: Compilers, Software Engineering I and Programming Languages II - Object Oriented Programming. The MOOC course shaped into 6 sections, which run for a week each. Therefore, the duration of the course was six weeks. The course in the platform edx includes 6 pages which are the following: 1. Course Info Page: This is the first page that appears when registered users entering the course. This page includes the central column announcements and on the right column of the page is given the ability to add additional information. The central column was used by the CMG Groups to publish announcements regarding the (a) start of a new unity, (b) information on a new section, (c) Information on test / project of the week, (d) Information on any topic in which there were several user s questions (mainly through discussions). The right column was used to update deadline dates and to add additional educational material (such as useful hyperlinks, tutorials etc.) 2. Courseware Page: The Courseware is the page that shows the sections of the course and the educational material. Under any educational material page (such as a video, a text, an image, a conversation, etc.) learners were able to add comments. The first section of the course, was an extra section entitle: Section 0: Guidance Navigation Lesson, which included hypertexts and video tutorials about (a) how to use the video player, (b) How do you respond to quizzes, exercises and (c) how to use discussions. Another six sections were created, where all the educational material were contained. Each section includes 7-10 educational videos with self-regulated quizzes, additional educational material such as documents and quizzes for the learner s evaluation. 3. Discussion Page: The Discussion Page includes the Discussion Forum of the course. The categorization of the discussion was by per week i.e. by sections of the course. The creation of a separate topic for discussion with their instructors to be conducted online. 4. Progress Page: The Progress page update with useful information and each learner s personal path. 5. Page Syllabus: An additional page was used which include Program and Course Information.

8 Technical Support Group made all the configurations to the platform to meet the educational staff demands. Finally, at the Implementation the CMG Groups followed the best practices on how to support learners throughout the educational process. CMG Groups were used announcements, discussion forums and Popular Social Networks to be in constant communication with learners. 5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK In this paper we presented the implementation of a MOOCs Guidelines based on best practices that supports the methodology process of creating MOOCs of the Hellenic Open University. Following the implementation of the three steps, widespread MOOC platforms were studied and selected in order to confirm good practices according to the designer side. This record helped to create guidelines which were incorporated into the methodology and played a very significant part of it. These guidelines guided the academic staff to design the courses and the educational material for MOOCs. In addition, during the educational process, they were guided on how to support and communicate with the huge amount of learners. Next step is to escalate the use of MOOCs, relying on the guidelines, in additional educational fields of the HOU. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research described in this paper has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) (Funding Program: HOU ). REFERENCES [1] Coursera. (2014). Take the world's best courses, online, for free. Retrieved May, 2014, from [2] Cross, S. (2013). Evaluation of the OLDS MOOC curriculum design course: participant perspectives, expectations and experiences. OLDS MOOC Project, Milton Keynes. [3] Daniel, J. (2012). Making sense of MOOCs: Musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 3. Retrieved May, 2014, from [4] de Waard, I. (2011). Explore a new learning frontier: MOOCs. Learning Solutions Magazine. Retrieved May, 2014, from [5] edχ. (2014). Take great online courses from the world's best universities. Retrieved May, 2014, from [6] Fini, A. (2009). The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Course Tools. International Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning, 10(5). [7]. (2014). Learning for Life. Retrieved May, 2014, from [8] Gaebel, M. (2013). MOOCs Massive Open Online Courses. EUA Ocassional Papers. Retrieved May, 2014, from [9] Grainger B., (2013). Introduction to Moocs: Avalanche, Illusion or Augmentation? Policy Brief Published by the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education. Retrieved May, 2014, from [10] Jordan, K. (2013). MOOC Completion Rates: The Data. Retrieved May, 2014 from [11] Kop, R., Fournier, H., & Mak, J. S.F. (2011). A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support on massive open online courses. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Special Issue - Emergent Learning, Connections, Design for Learning, 12(7), Retrieved May, 2014, from

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