Online Course Development Research Articles

Study on learning effect prediction models based on principal component analysis in MOOCs

In recent years, the rise and development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) have promoted the boom of online education and also promoted the research on learning analysis and mining based on big data of education. However, while offering a large number of high quality courses, there is also a phenomenon that the overall learning effect is not ideal. How to make effective use of MOOCs for teaching activities poses urgent practical requirements for educators and researchers. MOOCs store massive learners’ learning behavior data, and mining these data is of great significance to learners’ learning effects. Due to the deviation caused by the correlation between many behavior indexes, the paper analyze the nine measurable performance indexes by principal component analysis (PCA), and get three principal components factors in order to reduce the computational dimension and increase the comprehensibility, and then obtain a model of learning effect prediction, namely the PCA prediction model (PCA_PM). Logistic regression algorithm has a good fitting effect on behavioral indexes. Therefore, the paper use the logistic regression method to construct another model of learning effect prediction, namely the principal component logistic regression prediction model (PCL_PM), and predictive effects of two models were compared and analyzed. The results show that it is an effective way to help learners to improve the passing rate of the course by establishing the predictive models. The prediction accuracy of both PCA_PM and PCL_PM is high, but overall, the prediction effect of PCA_PM is better.

General informatics teaching with B-Learning teaching model

Blended learning (B-learning), a combination of face-to-face teaching and E-learning-supported-teaching in an online course, and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools have been studied in recent years. In addition, the use of this teaching model is effective in teaching and learning conditions in which some certain subjects are appropriate for the specific teaching context. As it has been a matter of concern of the universities in Vietnam today, deep studies related to this topic is crucial to be conducted. In this article, the process of developing online courses and organizing teaching for the General Informatics subject for first-year students at the Hue University of Education with B-learning teaching model will be presented. The combination of 60% face-to-face and 40% online learning.

Assessment approaches in massive open online courses: Possibilities, challenges and future directions

The development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has launched an era of large-scale interactive participation in education. While massive open enrolment and the advances of learning technology are creating exciting potentials for lifelong learning in formal and informal ways, the implementation of efficient and effective assessment is still problematic. To ensure that genuine learning occurs, both assessments for learning (formative assessments), which evaluate students’ current progress, and assessments of learning (summative assessments), which record students’ cumulative progress, are needed. Providers’ more recent shift towards the granting of certificates and digital badges for course accomplishments also indicates the need for proper, secure and accurate assessment results to ensure accountability. This article examines possible assessment approaches that fit open online education from formative and summative assessment perspectives. The authors discuss the importance of, and challenges to, implementing assessments of MOOC learners’ progress for both purposes. Various formative and summative assessment approaches are then identified. The authors examine and analyse their respective advantages and disadvantages. They conclude that peer assessment is quite possibly the only universally applicable approach in massive open online education. They discuss the promises, practical and technical challenges, current developments in and recommendations for implementing peer assessment. They also suggest some possible future research directions.

A comprehensive rubric for instructional design in e-learning

PurposeThe recognition of practice in online instruction is still subject to interpretation and different approaches as a result of the rapid changes in technology and its effect on society. The purpose of this paper is to address these differences through a synthesis that can be easily accessed and consulted by educators in the field of e-learning.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews different examples of rubrics and instruments in higher education to propose a more comprehensive rubric that constitutes a synthesis of how some institutions in HE approach best practice in this field.FindingsThe proposed comprehensive rubric emanating from the synthesis of different approaches supports the development, remixing, sharing and integration of online modules and courses by providing a single reference point with as wide a range as possible of potential pedagogical tools, facilities and approaches to e-learning.Research limitations/implicationsIt is not within the scope of this paper to review quality assurance processes and administrative components, but to propose a rubric for course design and self-review of faculty and higher education institutions for a better alignment with what is regarded as current standard best practice.Practical implicationsInstructional designers in e-learning have a new comprehensive rubric that can consult at design stage.Originality/valueDifferent approaches towards what is called “good practice” are brought together and analysed to provide a synthesis and a single source that can be consulted by practitioners in the field of e-learning.

Community of Inquiry Framework for Advanced Practice Nursing Students

Abstract Distance education programs are increasingly common in nursing education, and educators are challenged with creating online courses that provide students with quality learning experiences. For advanced practice nursing (APN) students, online courses need to engage students in learning while meeting their unique needs. The Community of Inquiry (COI) framework is grounded in theories of learning and teaching and is relevant for use in developing online courses for APN students. The purpose of this article is to describe the development of an online clinical practice management course for APN students using the COI framework.

Government’s Effort in Control Engineering Education in India

AbstractPresent manuscript deals with the Indian government effort in making the control engineering education, an equal standard to any developed country. Control Engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering which has an ample number of applications in the almost every core engineering discipline. This is the field which uses the feedback system to get the appropriate performance of the system without any human interaction. Mathematical modelling for the system designs is now performed on the simulation tools. There are multiple steps taken for control-engineering education by the Indian Government, which is a modern technology, applied in daily use from instruments to spacecraft. This manuscript gives a complete overview of different effort taken by the Indian Government to enhance the control engineering education such as developing online courses, online virtual labs, Scilab software packages, Scilab codes for books & Scilab cloud. NPTEL video courses, which are available on online platform, help the students as well as other academicians who have deep interest in the topics related to the control engineering. Virtual labs give the students power to perform the experiment online without setup of any specialized labs through the internet enable device. Scilab cloud is an open source software platform which gives a platform to the students to design the code for the problem & analysis it by changing the associated parameters with it. Textbook companion project is the associated project with scilab cloud in which scilab codes are developed for the solved examples of the certain engineering books. Doctoral thesis from the Indian institutes can be access through online at shodhaganga. With the implementation of 4G telecommunication technology in India, NPTEL videos, Scilab cloud & virtual lab can be accessed through the smartphone without computers or installing the software in smartphone.

Development and impact of a massive open online course (MOOC) for antimicrobial stewardship.

The University of Dundee and the BSAC developed a massive open online course (MOOC) to address the global need for education to support antimicrobial stewardship in low- and middle-income countries. An interactive course, Antimicrobial Stewardship: Managing Antibiotic Resistance, was developed and delivered via the FutureLearn© platform. The course ran over four 6 week periods during 2015 and 2016 supported by educators and was evaluated via data on uptake and feedback from learners on impact on clinical practice. In total, 32 944 people, 70% of them healthcare professionals, from 163 countries joined the course from Europe (49%), Asia (16%), Africa (13%), North America (9%), Australia (8%) and South America (5%). Between 33% and 37% of joiners in each run completed at least one step in any week of the course and 219 participants responded to a post-course survey. The course was rated good or excellent by 208 (95%) of the participants, and 83 (38%) intended to implement stewardship interventions in their own setting. A follow-up survey 6 months later suggested that 49% had implemented such interventions. The MOOC has addressed a global learning need by providing education free at the point of access, and learning from its development will help others embarking upon similar educational solutions. Initial quantitative and qualitative feedback suggests it has engaged participants and complements traditional educational methods. Measuring its real impact on clinical practice remains a challenge. The FutureLearn© platform offers flexibility for MOOCs to be sustainable through modification to remove educator facilitation but maintain active participant discussion.

Development of Online Course Based on Blended Teaching Design——"Machine Principle" as an Example

Aiming at the shortcomings of traditional classroom teaching, the characteristics of blended teaching mode based on MOOC are analyzed. On this basis, the teaching method of the online course of machine principle is designed to realize the transformation from Teacher - centered to student - centered in the classroom teaching. According to the characteristics of the existing service platform for online course, the teaching resources of machine principle online course are developed on the basis of dynamic virtual simulation of mechanism, and on this basis, the teaching system of machine principle online course which is suitable for the service platform online course of Harbin Institute of Technology is developed.

Virtual universities: factors of success and prospects of development

This article is devoted to the peculiarities of the formation and functioning of virtual universities, emerging in recent years in different countries of the world. The main approaches to their creation and financing are described. It is noted that along with public virtual universities, private universities are developing, including corporate virtual universities. The main models of virtual universities are classified, including the consortium model, the traditional model of the university with electronic education for individual educational programs, the model of educational organizations of distance learning and the actual virtual university model. Successful models of functioning of virtual universities in Great Britain, USA, Italy, South Korea, Russia and other countries are described. In the widespread model of the consortium, educational organizations jointly develop online courses, provide access to the repository of courses for students of these universities, and also have the opportunity to transfer courses to students of organizations that are members of the consortium. The main factors influencing the development of virtual universities are singled out. Along with successful examples of the implementation of the model of a consortium of educational organizations, negative examples of the functioning of such associations of higher education institutions are presented in the article. In conclusion, the main directions of the development of virtual universities are determined.

The development of medical MOOCs in China: current situation and challenges

ABSTRACTThis study aimed to investigate the current situation and challenges on the development of medical massive open online courses (MOOCs) in China. A survey was constructed and the statistical analysis was adopted to evaluate the medical MOOCs. The results showed that the medical MOOC-related journal papers, conference papers, books and dissertations have risen dramatically over the past five years. In addition, the top 6 most representative MOOC platforms provide the majority (87%) of medical courses. The statistical analysis showed that PMPH-MOOC was the most influential medical MOOC platform in China. Compared to the foreign medical MOOCs, medical MOOCs in China were urgently in need of systemic planning, interaction activities and international certification. Overall, the findings suggest that the development of medical MOOCs for higher education has been achieved a great success along with a huge challenge.

Investigating Interaction of Study Group Based Massive Open Online Courses

In the past few years, the rapid development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) has attracted wide attention from the society, and the high dropout rate of learners has become one of the issues of wide concern[1]. A major limitation of the current generation of MOOCS is ignore the advantage for students to make use of study group as resource. In this paper, we have built MOOCROOM platform to extract data and find out the team activity that affect the interest of learners through survival analysis[2]. We valuate an intervention that makes more interactivity in MOOCROOM. From the impact of the biggest team activities to improve the teaching management and study group building to reducing the dropout rate. And this will be helpful for students to complete the study process. We discuss implications for design, limitations of the current study, and directions for future research.

Learning Mechanism and Function Characteristics of MOOC in the Process of Higher Education

At present, the practice development of massive open online Courses (MOOC) is prior to the theoretical research about MOOC in academic circles. Through document analysis, participant observation and case analysis of MOOC, we find that the connotation of MOOC is mainly annotated from three dimensions: curriculum form, education model and knowledge innovation. According to the learning theory and teaching practice of MOOC, the teaching mode of MOOC is divided into three kinds: MOOC based on content, MOOC based on network and MOOC based on task. Compared with the traditional courses, MOOC has intrinsic characteristics such as large scale, openness, networking, personalized and participation, which includes the online learning effectiveness, the mastery learning, the interactive cooperation and the learning mechanism of complex system self-organization core. Through the analysis of MOOC learning mechanism, goal, characteristics and advantages, according to the investigation on the use of MOOC at home and abroad, combined with the characteristics of computing discipline, the two aspects of MOOC teaching function: one is to use the learning records on MOOC to study pedagogy, and create new educational theory; another is to use MOOC for the flipped classroom.

Online or face-to-face instruction? A qualitative study on the electrocardiogram course at the University of Ulm to examine why students choose a particular format

BackgroundSince the introduction of the e-learning electrocardiogram (ECG) course ‘ECG Online’ into the curriculum at the University of Ulm, a small but relatively constant number of students have decided not to participate in the online course but to attend the face-to-face course, although the content of both courses is identical. The present study examined why students prefer one format or the other.MethodsIn a qualitative research approach, ten medical students were questioned in a guided interview. At the time of the survey the interviewees were enrolled in the 7th to 10th semesters. Among the respondents, 2 had participated only in the face-to-face ECG course, 4 only in the online version and 4 in both the face-to-face and the online course.ResultsInterestingly, the very factors associated with e-learning – and always praised as advantages of it – are viewed critically by the students. Thus, although the 24-h access to learning content was consistently evaluated positively, the unlimited availability (lack of expiry date) was not seen as conducive to learning. The lack of fixed time constraints and the attendant lack of pressure were important reasons why some of the students had discontinued the online course prematurely. A similar distinction was seen in the flexibility of location for e-learning, because the very obligation to be physically present on a particular day at a fixed time led to a higher degree of commitment to courses and a willingness to actually attend the course until the end. In addition, if the content has a high degree of perceived professional relevance face-to-face courses are preferred because they offer the possibility of direct interaction.ConclusionsEven though the small sample size limits the generalisability of the results, our findings indicate that when developing online courses students’ needs could be better met if measures were included to strengthen extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and formats were favoured that enable students to have a minimum level of personal interaction with the lecturer.

The Puzzle of Online Courses

With the development of the Internet, online courses like a hurricane swept across the world, teachers consciously or unconsciously are involved in it. In order to make clear the concept and characteristic of online education, this paper, based on the readers' perspective, reviewed the development of the online courses, and summarized the author's own online course construction and application process. It also put forward the teaching staff's confusion about the online course, which will cause people to think, and finally gave some suggestions for the future development of online courses, and these will provide reference for who will construct or teaching on online courses

Reality and Thinking of Massive Open Online Course of Universities

Based on discussing the present situation, comparing the main advantages and disadvantages of the development of massive open online course (MOOC), the importance of the construction of MOOC combining with college experience of different courses was highlighted. The problems in the construction and utilization of MOOC were analyzed through feedback via network and classroom in this paper, the idea that not every school and discipline should blindly carry out MOOC was put forward.

Online Teaching Efficacy: A Product of Professional Development and Ongoing Support.

The purpose of the pilot study was to investigate the perceptions of online teaching efficacy of nursing faculty who teach courses in which 51% or more of the content is offered online. Bandura's psychological construct of self-efficacy served as the conceptual framework. The research survey was administered to nursing faculty in a state university system located in the southeastern United States of America, plus two private universities. The Michigan Nurse Educator's Sense of Efficacy for Online Teaching Scale, which contains 32 items that measure how nurse educators judge their current capabilities for teaching online nursing courses, was used to gather data. Overall, the scores reflected that faculty perceived themselves as quite a bit efficacious on a scale that ranged from 1 to 9. As nursing educators received more support in designing and implementing online courses, their efficacy increased. It is critical that faculty are supported on an ongoing basis to increase and develop online teaching skills in order to teach high-quality courses in online programs. Faculty members must also be recognized for their work, time, and commitment required to be effective online educators. The findings of this study revealed those participants who had a number of professional development supports and release time to develop online courses have a greater sense of efficacy.

Study of the Impact of Online Courses on MEM Students’ Creativity

With the rapid development of online courses in colleges and universities, we should query the positive and negative effects of online courses on students’ creativities while upholding optimistic attitude. In order to avoid subjective judgment, this paper selects students who choose “Project Management” as an elective course to do the analysis by doing contrast experiment of traditional MEM students and online MEM student and found that there is no significant difference between online learners and ordinary learners. Although there exists a “lag phenomenon” in the early stage of online course learners, in general, no significant difference of creativities affect online course students and regular class learners.

The development of a massive open online course during the 2014–15 Ebola virus disease epidemic

PurposeTimely training was urgently needed at the onset of the 2014 Ebola virus disease epidemic. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have grown in popularity, though little is known about their utility in time-sensitive situations, including infectious disease outbreaks. MethodsWe created the first English language massive open online course on Ebola virus disease. Designed by a team representing various units of Emory University and six partner institutions, the six module course was aimed at a global general audience but also relevant for health care professionals. ResultsOver 7,000 learners from 170 countries participated in the initial course offering. More than a third of learners were from emerging economies, including seven percent from Africa, and another 13% from countries outside the United States who received individuals requiring treatment for Ebola virus disease. ConclusionsCreating and producing the first English language MOOC on EVD in a short time period required effective collaboration and strong coordination between subject matter and course development experts from Emory. Through these collaborative efforts, the development team was able to provide urgently needed training and educational materials while the epidemic of EVD continued to radiate through West Africa.

Design of an online medication safety module for clinicians.

In Australia, there are very few online courses addressing medication safety issues. Educating clinicians about medication safety is paramount given the increased responsibility of clinicians in advanced practice roles including nurses at several key points throughout the medication process that encompass prescribing, dispensing, administering and monitoring medications. The model used for the course design is based on adult teaching principles. The modules incorporate several knowledge-based presentations along with interactive activities. An integrative pedagogical approach is used in designing the modules in the online course. The online education modules target clinicians who work in the community setting. Although the modules are intended to reinforce the principles of medication safety principles identified in the literature, there is a focus on professional responsibility and understanding the laws governing medication disposals and handling. The course used an integrative approach suitable for pharmacy programs. The design and development of a medication safety online course was described by using the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care and the 2011 Curriculum developed by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners frameworks. The course has gained accreditation by the Australian Royal College of General Practice as part of its continuing education development programs.

The Status of Career and Technical Education Undergraduate and Graduate Programs in the United States

The purpose of this study was to examine undergraduate and graduate student enrollments, course delivery modes, and curricular trends and issues of CTE programs. Based on findings from 139 program/department coordinators, results emphasized that although CTE programs within institutions of higher education have declined in number (Fletcher, Gordon, Asunda, & Zirkle, 2015), student enrollments within those programs have remained steady compared to prior studies (Bruening et al., 2001; Lynch, 1990). Even so, CTE program/department administrators have articulated that declining student enrollment is a major challenge within their programs. Additionally, the development of online courses and the impact of state/national educational reform initiatives were identified as major curricular trends for CTE programs. Recommendations include the need for CTE faculty to embrace online instruction, and for programs to use broader nomenclature of CTE/Workforce Education, instead of names of more traditional subdisciplines within the field to remain more accessible and sustainable in the future. The condition of undergraduate and graduate CTE programs will likely impact the viability and sustainability of CTE teacher preparation programs, recruitment of a talented and diverse CTE teaching force, continuity of the U.S. teaching workforce, and ability of K–12 teachers to maintain high-quality CTE programs.