Abstract
This study examines how college students rate Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in terms of User Interface Design and Universal Instructional Design. The research participants were 115 undergraduate students from a public midwestern university in the United States. Each participant evaluated three randomly chosen MOOCs, all of which were developed on the Coursera platform, using rubrics for User Interface Design and Universal Instructional Design. The results indicated that students had an overall positive impression of each MOOC’s course design. This study concludes that overall course design strategies are not associated with the massive dropout rates currently documented in MOOC learning environments. The authors suggest the use of appropriate instructional design principles be further explored.
Highlights
In 2012, the interest in massive open online courses (MOOC) was so intense that the New York Times declared 2012 “The Year of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)”
This indicates that students’ initial impression of each MOOC was very positive. It indicates that the MOOC authors incorporated design properties that appear to be helpful to students
Because students have a positive impression of each of the MOOCs, it is unlikely that there is a relationship between the User Interface Design, Universal Instructional Design, and students dropping out of MOOCs
Summary
In 2012, the interest in massive open online courses (MOOC) was so intense that the New York Times declared 2012 “The Year of the MOOC”. Cheng et al (2013) studied behaviors in online discussion forums of over 100,000 learners in 73 courses offered by Coursera, and found various correlations with the dropout rate. One of these factors was the amount of peer-graded homework related to the courses. The authors developed an automated system that identified small talk and filtered it out of the fire hose. They argued that this method would help learners focus on the useful posts, and so enhance the learning experience. Guo (2014) suggested that to maximize student engagement, video lecture length in MOOCs should be broken into small, bite-sized pieces of around six minutes or shorter rather than having hours-long video lectures that follow the more traditional in-person lecture model
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