Learners’ Perception on Learning Materials and Tasks of a Massive Open Online Course

Abstract

Recent years have seen massive open online courses (MOOCs) emerge as one of the most trending online learning environments. Malaysia has also embarked on MOOCs with its’ Malaysia MOOC initiative, which is a collaboration between the Ministry of Education Malaysia with 20 public universities. In the initiative, Universiti Malaysia Kebangsaan (UKM) has developed a MOOC for ethnic relations. This study investigates learners’ perception of MOOC learning materials based on: type of video lectures; (ii) communication style in video lectures; and humor effect (speech ballons) in video lectures. The study also studies MOOC learning tasks according to the factors which are: structure of learning tasks, learner autonomy in learning tasks, and social settings of learning tasks. A survey is distributed to 104 undergraduates studying in an ethnic relation at UKM. The MOOC is used as learning resource. The study is conducted in a period of four months. The findings indicate that with regards to MOOC learning materials, live action videos and animations, informal communication style and integration of human elements (speech ballons) are preferred by learners. The findings also indicated that for MOOC learning tasks, learners prefer unstructured learning tasks rather than structured ones and they prefer to learn in groups rather than individually. Mixed results were obtained for learner autonomy where half of the learners preferred student-center learning while the other half preferred teacher-based instruction.