Learners’ Adoption of MOOCs Prior and During Covid-19 Pandemic: A Case Study on Building Resilience in Higher Education

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has elevated the need for ‘building resilience’ to be a core part of the planning and management of future education systems. Resilience primarily implies the capacity to adapt and adjust to new environmental conditions subject to retaining the basic tenets and identity of the educational system. While the pandemic has caused severe disruption across the higher education sector, it also changed the complete outlook on teaching and learning in higher educational institutions. In general, adoption of E-learning platforms surged during this crisis period and MOOCs, in particular, were increasingly encouraged and offered by institutions for continuing education. Studies have shown that learners enrolled in MOOC courses for many different reasons (Crues et al, 2018). One such indicated that self-regulation was seen as the most significant predictor of MOOC adoption and female learners showed a high inclination to adopt them (Ma & Lee, 2019). Among Indian students, building skill-sets was seen as one of the key factors of intention to adopt MOOCs (Mohan et al, 2020). However, it is significant to study why learners adopted MOOCs, especially during the pandemic since this can serve as an ideal case for studying and gaining insights on resilience built against an emergency situation. This paper has been visualized against this background to investigate and compare how MOOCs were adopted by higher education learners, prior to and during the pandemic period. The case study is based on a selected MOOC wherein an attempt would be made to study learner orientations and adoptions to MOOCs in normal and pandemic settings and to assess if there has been any difference in their access, with a special focus on girls and marginalized communities. It is important to understand the learner characteristics, reasons why they enrolled and learner practices from the two selected situations. The parameters chosen to examine the learners are; demographic profile; MOOC experience, access to the course, perceived usefulness, self-learning strategies, learning preferences, purpose and motivation. Empirical analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data would be adopted to interpret the data. The study findings would have implications while investing and building disaster resilience in higher educational institutions and creating a robust and quality infrastructural governance for MOOCs.