Abstract
<p class="3">Current research into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) has neglected the potential of using learner comments for discipline-specific analysis. This article explores how MOOCs, within the historical discipline, can be used to generate, investigate, and document personal narratives, and argues that they serve as a rich platform for historical resource generation. Through these narratives, this research explores changing perceptions of learning; from learning history at school to learning about history in a MOOC. This exploration uses a qualitative thematic analysis of learner comments related to personal narratives of learning history at school from the Trinity College Dublin/Futurelearn “Irish Lives in War and Revolution: 1912-1923” MOOC. These personal narratives were generated both directly and indirectly through four pedagogical tools; reflective questions, multimedia resources, external links, and inter-learner interaction. Broad themes emerged from the analysis of personal narratives including attitudes toward history at school, biased and inadequate teaching, and MOOC teaching compared with school experiences. The analysis demonstrated that MOOCs serve as a generative repository for personal and family historical narratives, and described how MOOCs can change perceptions of teaching and learning history. This paper contributes a novel understanding of MOOCs for discipline-specific analysis, provides a framework for MOOC historical resource generation, and describes changing perceptions of learning from the perspective of MOOC learners. </p>
Highlights
Research into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) is at a relatively early stage, and has focused on key areas including pedagogical theory, technological solutions to education, conceptual issues, openness, student engagement and motivation, institutional objectives, and case studies (Liyanagunawardena, Adams, & Williams, 2013; Sangrà, González-Sanmamed, & Anderson, 2015)
This research explores learner comments from the Trinity College Dublin/Futurelearn “Irish Lives in War and Revolution: 1912-1923” history MOOC to assess the potential benefits for historical research, especially in the field of Oral History
An open approach to qualitative coding was adhered to, resulting in the emergence of thematic elements related to the school experiences of MOOC learners
Summary
Research into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) is at a relatively early stage, and has focused on key areas including pedagogical theory, technological solutions to education, conceptual issues, openness, student engagement and motivation, institutional objectives, and case studies (Liyanagunawardena, Adams, & Williams, 2013; Sangrà, González-Sanmamed, & Anderson, 2015). These new online learning spaces offer wide opportunities for many research avenues, but have mainly been concentrated in the educational theory, computer science and online learning domains (Ebben & Murphy, 2014). The contentious nature of this period heightens the value of these learner comments as a resource for exploring the relationship between the public and history, helping us understand how Public History narratives are formed
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