Abstract
MOOCs have been seen as holding promise for advancing Open Education. While the pedagogical design of the first MOOCs grew out of the Open Education Movement, the current trend has MOOCs exhibiting fewer of the original openness goals than anticipated. The aim of this study is to examine the practices and attitudes of MOOC educators at an African university and ask whether and how their practices and attitudes become open after creating and teaching a MOOC. Activity Theory is used to contextually locate the educators’ motivations and to analyse their practices in terms of striving towards an object. With this lens we describe how educators’ openness-related practices and attitudes change over time in two different MOOCs. Two sets of conceptions of open practices are used to detect instances of change, providing four dimensions of changed open educational practices. Semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and artefacts provide data for this rare study, which considers these issues from the perspective of the Global South. Through studying the educators’ practices in relation to openness, it becomes evident how open practices are emergent and responsive.
Highlights
Pressing educational challenges prevalent in the Global South include the need for high quality and accessible education (Africa-America Institute, 2015; Dhanarajan & Abeywardena 2013)
In this case the community consisted of a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) learning design team and the educators’ assistants
The division of labour refers to the resources and services available to the subjects for creating the MOOC and how these were organised between the educators and their assistants, the MOOC learning designers, the MOOC project managers, the university’s MOOC advisory committee and Intellectual Property lawyers
Summary
Pressing educational challenges prevalent in the Global South include the need for high quality and accessible education (Africa-America Institute, 2015; Dhanarajan & Abeywardena 2013). While there has been considerable research to date on how learners respond to MOOCs, the motivations and impacts on individual educators offering MOOCs is less well known and in particular what the influence is on educators’ perceptions and practices as relates to their core or mainstream teaching. This is especially the case in Global South contexts where universities and by extension their academics produce only a fraction of both Open Educational Resources (OER) and MOOCs globally (Czerniewicz & Naidoo, 2013)
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