Designing Culturally Inclusive MOOCs

Abstract

AbstractMassive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become one of the increasingly popular channels of learning. Any given MOOC attracts thousands of learners from all around the globe with diverse language, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The diversity among MOOC learners is one of the unique characteristics that differentiates them from any given campus classroom. This poses a great challenge for instructional designers to create learning experiences that resonates with their diverse audience. This paper reports on the efforts of an instructional design team, towards creating culturally inclusive MOOCs. A design-based approach was applied to experiment, test and evaluate these efforts over the course of four MOOCs on the topic of Design Thinking. We applied in-depth qualitative interviews with international course participants, pre-and post-course surveys, and observations from these courses to gather insights into learners’ perspectives. The authors suggest a set of instructional strategies to consider while designing MOOCs to address the needs of learners from diverse cultural backgrounds. With the increasing uptake of MOOCs all around the globe, it is of utmost importance for MOOC designers to create learning experiences that are inclusive for their diverse learners.KeywordsMassive Open Online courses (MOOCs)Cultural inclusivityDiversity