Evaluation of the MOOCs Quality and Its Effectiveness for Teachers’ Training in the Field of Digital Competences and Their Use in Education: A Case Study

Abstract

This study presents the research results obtained after the assessment of the digital competences of the pre-service and in-service teachers after their completion of the MOOC “Contemporary ICT Tools and Innovative Methods of Creative Education”. The paper provides a short description of the MOOC, requirements to pass the course and analysis of the learning outcomes through the students’ self-evaluation and feedback. The MOOC was developed in Polish and English within the project “MOOCs for Sciences of Education” and hosted on the Polish MOOCs platform Navoica (www.navoica.pl) within the framework of the competition, initiated by of Ministry of Education and Science of Poland and National Center for Research and Development (NCBR ‒ Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju) on “Direction to the MOOC”. Keeping in mind that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have developed into a mainstream for universities, education reformers and startup companies, especially in the time of the COVID-19, the study is believed to contribute to the development of the MOOC pedagogy, and address the question of the MOOCs effectiveness for students’ learning outcomes and satisfaction. The experimental MOOC “Contemporary ICT Tools and Innovative Methods of Creative Education”, which was aimed at enhancing teachers’ digital competences, contained 8 modules, and was attended by more than 90 students through its 1st edition in 2020‒2021. The conclusions of the MOOC in focus and overall recommendations on enhancing the MOOCs effectiveness for formal education and learning outcomes have been evaluated based on the research data and provided accordingly. The selected statistical analyses and the data comparisons were made using Wilcoxon’s test at the significance level alpha = 0.05. The normality of the distributions of the studied variables was checked using the Shapiro Wilk test.