Issues in Instructional Design of Massive Open Online Courses MOOC

Abstract

is considered as a new kind of online education, so far, the international academic community has been conducted series of researches based on the mechanism of MOOC. However, there is little study about the issues in Instructional Design of MOOC. The paper analyzes the current development and point out the bottleneck of instructional design of MOOC. By summarizing the international view of MOOC, paper also analyzed different aspects of in accordance with the ten principles of instructional design proposed by scholar Merill and Margaryan, and finally come up with some ideas for future research. Keywords—MOOC; Principles of Instructional Design; Teaching Issues; Educational Technology I. INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN OF A massive open course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web [1]. The word was first used to describe an open courses ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’, which was developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at University of Manitoba, more than 2,200 people around the world participate in this course. A growing number of universities around the world offer MOOCs since 2012. MOOCs have been recognized as a major advancement in higher education. For example, Legon mentioned the ‘Quality Matters’ that MOOCs actually provide a quality service, because the course is designed for typical students and integrate with the higher education courses. However, critics like Daniel claimed that the lack of novelty in MOOC, as well as its extreme exaggeration of the impact of education and learning scale. 2013 The Observatory of Borderless Higher Education (OBHE) mentioned the specific focus of is to emphasize the ‘high-quality content', but did not pay much attention to the instructional design(ID) and the overall learning experience. Some people suggest that MOOCs could provide public indices of quality, which may expose weaknesses of elite education in teaching and learning. II. THE BOTTLENECK OF The United States has become a pioneer and leader in the world higher education network, especially the network development of higher education has won a worldwide attention [2]. Sloan Consortium Report has been seen as a ‘window’ to show the characteristics of network development of higher education. In 2012, Stanford University, Harvard University and other famous universities have released courses in massive open online courses Coursera, Udacity and Edx. ‘New York Times’ said that 2012 was the MOOC year [3]. Sloan Consortium captures the importance of network for higher education and launched an investigation. A. Popularity and role of is unclear Most colleges and universities still hold a uncertain view of MOOC. 2015 The Sloan Consortium report compares the data in 2012, 2013 and 2014, as shown in Table 1. TABLE I. UNIVERSIT JOIN RATIO OF (UNIT: %) Already joined Prepare to join Haven’t decided Don’t join Sum up 2012 2.6 9.4 55.4 32.7 10