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Introduction
Many scholars have explored important changes taking place in the landscape of the present higher education system. Around 10 million people in America are unemployed, whereas else 4 million jobs are still vacant. It is noted that employers are facing challenges in exploring qualified candidates. The time mentions establishing new criteria for training the specialist, applying unique tools, and offering them online educational technologies (Yuan and Powell 2013). Various educators are making use of technology and are trying to transform each side of the university experience from supporting students to making an investment in informed education for minimizing the financial and geographical barriers to learning.
Massive Online Courses (MOOCs)
Massive Online Courses (MOOCs) started in North America and is going from the last five years, which had driven different ways of learning. The brief history of Michael Gaebel related to MOOCs, depicts that MOOCs are developing successfully in the last eight years, along with the right purpose, for not only offering learning-based opportunities but also enhancing the experience of learning. In brief, MOOC is considered online courses, have a need for formal entry, along with a participation limit, no fees, and students who will enroll in these wouldn’t earn any credit (Gaebel 2013). MOOCs are mainly free of cost, massive, and international, which implies that they are formed for not only any student but also aim to attract the right tutors from various nations. MOOCs are not removed, once they are finished, rather they stay online and are applied by the participants.
Just like various other educational innovations took place, which brought a change in the learning process, the MOOCs implementation arose a particular type of disagreement as well as dissatisfaction. Though, this kind of approach has gone more famous in different countries, mainly in America. Coursera is the leader in the area of MOOCs, and holds more than 5 million students, coming from around 195 countries. Presently, there are different types of online courses, due to the different pedagogical methods in distance education learning (Liyanagunawardena, Williams and Adams 2013).
Anant Agarwal, who manages edX, also mentioned in his speech that, although 2013 was the hype year for MOOCs, still there are high aspirations, which are adopted by individual disappointing outcomes. He also mentioned different ways related to supplement traditional classroom and high-level learning. The author also thinks that the current education system should be rearranged, with an aim to satisfy the requirements of current students. He mentioned reimagining the system of education and moving from lecture halls towards online spaces. He believes that the courses of distance learning should complement along with the traditional type of learning and teaching (Agarwal 2014).
Active learning- instead of having students move in the class, and view lectures, it is important to replace what is known as lessons. These lessons are mainly interleaved system of interactive and video exercises, which is taught by asking questions.
Instant response- through taking an immediate response, the grades are applied through the computer. Therefore, through immediate outcomes, students can quickly try to use answers. In case they are not right, they can avail instant response, and they can even try again, and this gets quite engaging.
These things are not happening in the future, but it’s the current situation. Therefore, blended learning pilots are applied in different universities as well as in high schools all over the globe. These types of technologies support, and it is noted that the blended model can even help in revolutionizing education and even support in solving the practical issues related to MOOCs in the context of business.
Barriers to MOOC implementation
There are certain barriers associated with MOOC implementation, such as failure to have digital literacy or challenges that are placed by the governments of individual countries as per the political basis. The issues related to enough quality education in the use of MOOC are explained by the University of Leicester Professor Grainne Conole. He mentions that while techniques for ensuring this is rightly set up by the previous educational institutions, these methods are not fixed in any formal sense for MOOC. The coming of MOOCs expects the new democratic education age, in which anybody can easily access the courses of any university in the world free of cost (Downes 2008).
Nevertheless, there exists no fear about the English language, which is a highly used language, which might create hurdles for learners from the advantage it provides. English is referred to as completes dominant in the educational market. As per Nesterko (2013), most of the international Harvard X learners arrive in the countries of English speaking (Nesterko 2013). This factor is no surprise for Harvard and edX courses, which are narrated in English, along with chosen subtitles of a foreign language (Downes 2007). The development strategies of MOOCs should be re-edited:
Students require getting more responsible while adopting their learning and should manage their time, and even maintain the motivation towards completing the course.
Students need to have inexpensive and reliable access to online courses for a period of time in a conductive learning environment (Nesterko 2013).
Internet education as designed by massive audiences usually fails to have responsiveness towards unique student culture as well as professional experience, mainly students coming from underrepresented groups.
Internet learning environment often struggles in exploring the disengagement of students from a course or either they fail to cope with the content they learn (Marshall 2013).
Despite such facts that progress move and MOOC had gone more modern, it is noted that still, traditional education is more accepted and conventional through different educational centres. Enthusiasts of MOOC explore advances between learners of courses (Stewart, Siemens and Cormier 2010). For instance, the participants might establish long-term goals, even though they are not able to completely shape them. It will motivate members related to online training to get a unit in social networking groups (Fini 2009). It can be considered as another nuance, which should be referred, to while implementing or designing MOOCs, such as student background and culture.
Accessibility of MOOC, as well as its less cost, is an issue for the future. Most of the online course includes less enrolment. On another side, MOOC is free as well as includes no credit-bearing. They are designed by considering learners and are interactive (Fini 2009).
Characteristics of an online course
Downes (2007) recommended that the essential aspects of the online course apply the principles of connective such as openness, diversity, interactivity, connectedness as well as autonomy (Downes 2008). The principle of autonomy permits the learners with the highest choice of how, where, what, and when to learn. The principle of diversity makes sure that the students come from the enough diverse population, to avoid echo chambers and group thinking (Downes 2007).
It is recommended that Downes and Siemens, hold the whole idea related to the educational course, which requires being reconceived through the closed group, highly structured, and traditional group (Place 2013). In this students relies on the tutors for the purpose of extensive travel of learners that are self-directed. They explored that the outcome of the investigation about the expectations and awareness going around the MOOCs depicts that students of MOOCs are even not aware of the attributes, associated with the term (Downes 2009). Around 3% mention that they are documented about this topic and they understand its meaning; around 28% hold certain information, whereas else 37% had only heard about MOOCs, but they are not aware of its significance. 27% of the members had mentioned that they had directly participated in MOOCs, whereas else 12% had only read about it. There 36% of the members hold explicit knowledge, whereas else 15% had heard, but are not aware of what MOOCs imply, and 9% had a particular idea about it (Downes 2009).
The author mentioned that the tutors emphasize the complete education system as well as the development of human resources, in which type of assessment holds high significance (Chew 2015). In contrast to this, students stress over interpersonal, and personal growth as well as social problems, like conflict management, civic life participation, personal development, and coaching (Carr 2012). Adequate application and subject selection of graphic content for the development of MOOCs can help in creating personal barriers. Nevertheless, there are various positive experiences to fulfil these challenges, like the contribution of inspired as well as motivated professionals (Nkuyubwatsi 2013).
Instructional strategies and MOOCs challenges
The MOOCs development comes across different funding issues in the beginning, and it was also expected that different courses would incur no cost. The Certain amount comes through the registered students, who are interested in doing complete courses from beginning to end and attaining the corresponding completion document (McRae 2006). They were even highly motivated towards acquiring the knowledge, which will enable them to hold the best career prospects. Li Yuan, as well as the Centre for educational technology and interoperability standards, mentioned in their article, “MOOCs as well as disruptive innovation,” that there is a requirement to go and rethink the present high education policies and structure as well as working practices, which create an obstruction in innovation (Rocheleau 2014). It is not entirely clear actually, how MOOC methods towards online education will help in creating money.
Most of the MOOC start-ups fail to have the right business models and are also adopting similar methods, like Silicon Valley through constructing the fast as well as they are also worried about the stream of revenue. Christensen (2003) recommended the disruptive innovation model that is different from the traditional innovation of maintenance, and it’s highly aimed towards enhancing the previous system (McGreal, Kinuthia, Marshall, and McNamara 2013). Disruptive innovation is the one, where items are introduced, which are not better than the available items, but the one, which provide benefits that seem to appear to new clients, like less costly, simplicity as well as convenience.
Christensen (2003) explored two kinds of innovations, which create an impact on the business and organization, such as disruptive and sustaining. As per the author, sustaining innovation is highly targeted toward enhancing the previous system, whereas else disruptive innovation is highly aimed towards creating a new market by reducing the cost or either designing the various types of customers or different requirements of previous clients (Ulrich and Nedelcu 2014). Disruptive innovation connects different and unique technology, which holds the potential of evolving rapidly, having an innovative model of business. The below figure depicts the disruptive innovation model, which also represents the present MOOC development.
Conclusion
Science and technology have tried to spawn new techniques for learning and teaching, which can alter the experience of students in the coming years. Teachers are applying technology for transforming the experience of college and support students to get more informed about education, with an aim to minimize the financial barriers to learning.
References
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