The UnMOOCing Process: Extending the Impact of MOOC Educational Resources as OERs

José A Ruipérez-Valiente,Manuel Castro,Justin Reich,Sergio Martin

doi:10.3390/su12187346

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) came into the educational ecosystem attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world. The original courses were completely open and free, targeting the worldwide population. However, current MOOC providers have pivoted towards more private directions, and we often find that MOOC materials are completely closed within their hosting platforms and cannot be retrieved from them by their learners. This diminishes the potential of MOOCs by making content available to a small proportion of learners and severely limits the reusability of the educational resources. In this paper, we present a process that we call ‘unMOOCing’, in which we transform the resources of a MOOC into OERs. We taught a MOOC on Open Education in the UNED Abierta platform, and we ‘unMOOCed’ all of its educational resources, making them available to download by the learners that are taking the course. The results of the unMOOCing were very encouraging: the possibility of downloading the course resources was the most highly rated component of the course. Additionally, the two unMOOCed materials that were considered as most useful (presentations and contents in a PDF) were downloaded by 90% of the learners. Now that the majority of MOOC providers are moving towards a more closed educational approach, we believe that this paper sends a powerful message for bringing back the original MOOC concept of ‘Openness’ with the unMOOCing process, thus contributing to the wider dissemination and democratization of education across the globe.

Highlights

It was 2012 when the New York Times decided to name the year as “The Year of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)” [1], attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world
A natural transition that happened was to reuse these contents in Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) [11] and the emergence of Massive Private Online Courses (MPOCs) [12], which is a new modality that is becoming increasingly important for professional training and in partnership with universities [13]
We take a MOOC on Open Education that has been taught by the coauthors of this manuscript and others, and we unMOOCed all of its educational resources, making them available to download by the learners that are taking the course

Summary

Introduction

It was 2012 when the New York Times decided to name the year as “The Year of the MOOC” [1], attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world. Researchers were extremely excited to study large numbers of learners from the entire world at the same time [3], educators were excited with the challenge of teaching at scale [4], and companies perceived the entrance of MOOCs in higher education as an opportunity for new business models [5]. MOOCs are being used to educate learners at scale across numerous topics [7]. This subsection reviews the demographics and background of the learners that enrolled to the course. This is informative to understand what kind of learners were interested in the course, and their potential interest in downloading the unMOOCed resources.

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion