Abstract
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are changing the way in which people can access digital knowledge, thus creating new opportunities for learning and competence development. MOOCs leverage the free and open use of digitized material through supportive on-line systems. MOOCs have gained worldwide popularity and many education providers have started to offer courses in different domains such as innovation management and entrepreneurship tackling recent demands for better employability and social inclusion. This paper presents a beneficial application of MOOCs to support the design and delivery of personalized learning paths aimed to develop competencies in the technology entrepreneurship domain. Using a design science approach, a platform for the delivery of open courses has been developed along with a set of experimental courses and learner/instructors guidelines. The platform is based on a roadmap purposefully designed to drive course classification, competence mapping and interactive learning gap/priority analysis. The paper reports a trial set of the system with undergraduate students conducted to draw feedback for iterative system design.
Highlights
The education system has been significantly impacted by the development of information technology and the introduction of web-based knowledge management and learning tools to deliver effective, just-in time and personalized learning processes (Assaf, Elia, Fayyoumi, & Taurino, 2009; Elia, Secundo, & Taurino, 2009).In particular, the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has significantly supported the improvement of skills based on free and open access to digitized materials
This paper presents an application of Massive open online courses (MOOCs) to support the design and delivery of personalized learning paths aimed to build technology entrepreneurship competencies
The activities which have been operationalized in the MOOC platform are based on a technology entrepreneurship roadmap (TER) including 12 activities categorized in three groups (5 “desk”, 4 “pre-market”, and 3 “market” activities)
Summary
The education system has been significantly impacted by the development of information technology and the introduction of web-based knowledge management and learning tools to deliver effective, just-in time and personalized learning processes (Assaf, Elia, Fayyoumi, & Taurino, 2009; Elia, Secundo, & Taurino, 2009). MOOCs create distributed and collaborative learning environments, which stimulate knowledge production and application, serving both “vertical growth” of people in specific knowledge fields, and “horizontal growth” in terms of soft skills that are essential in the new economic system (Audretsch & Thurik, 2001) This is in line with the emergence of interdisciplinary “T-shaped” professionals (Oskam, 2009; Elia, Margherita, Secundo, & Moustaghfir, 2011; Secundo, Romano, Passiante, & Del Vecchio, 2013), which are endowed with “horizontal” competencies. MOOC platforms, more than traditional e-learning systems, capitalize the disruptive trends that characterize the “shared economy” in the form of networked and distributed creation and reuse of knowledge and learning resources In such an endeavor, this paper presents an application of MOOCs to support the design and delivery of personalized learning paths aimed to build technology entrepreneurship competencies. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reports the theoretical background of technology-based education and online courses; Section 3 explains the research method; Section 4 illustrates the system developed; Section 5 presents a trial test and preliminary system evaluation; Section 6 concludes the article with limitations and paths for further research
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