THE GLOBAL MOOQ SURVEY: BUILDING A COMMON QUALITY REFERENCE FRAMEWORK FOR IMPROVING, ASSESSING AND COMPARING MOOC DESIGN

摘要

Societies and economies are experiencing a time of transition and change all over the world. As a consequence, Open (Online) Education has experienced a major development raising awareness amongst all actors. It has led to global grass-root movements, events, communities and associations as well as international policies and implementations in national and regional educational systems. During the last years Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became very popular, leading to an increasing debate about their quality as an education tool. To address the quality issues involved, the Massive Online Open Education Quality (MOOQ) project was initiated as the European Alliance for the Quality of MOOCs. It is a 3-year project funded by the European Union under the ERASMUS+ call. MOOQ is directly relevant to several key aspects of the 2011 EU Modernization Agenda. The project's mission is to develop a quality reference framework for the adoption, the design, the delivery and the evaluation of MOOCs in order to empower MOOC providers for the benefit of the learners. The main goal of MOOQ is therefore the development and the integration of quality approaches, new pedagogies and organisational mechanisms into MOOCs with a strong focus on the learning processes, methodologies and assessments. The first output of the MOOQ project is a global survey on existing practices and design patterns. The phenomena of MOOCs is a rather complex one as it results from different kind of approaches. This fact had important consequences in the diversity of formats used and also its features as well as the true nature and purpose of the educational experience they provide. In order to categorize design practices, MOOQ applied the typology suggested by Lisa Lane, based on the distinction between three basic categories: network-based, content-based and task-based MOOC models. The development of the survey started with the establishment of a quality reference matrix comprising the basic categories of a typical MOOC design process. The research used as reference the process model of EN ISO/IEC 19796-1. This is based on the generic process model that is divided into seven process categories containing in total 38 processes. However, for the MOOQ objectives the first two categories were merged, giving way to only six process categories. The MOOQ quality reference process model consists therefore of three pillars which represent the main aspects involved in the production and delivery of MOOCs, each subdivided in 34 dimensions and respective descriptors. As a consequence, a number of critical elements were identified and incorporated in the design of the surveys in order to allow for appropriate categorization of the design patterns. Three different surveys were prepared and launched, adjusting the 15 constructs to each of the target groups previously selected (learners, designers and facilitators). The surveys included each a mix of various types of items (open-end questions, five-level Likert questions, multiple-choice questions and yeso questions) and are available in 3 different languages (English, French and Portuguese). An excess of 625 questionnaires (443 partially and 182 fully) were completed. An additional 36 semi-structured interviews with MOOC designers, facilitators and providers has been also carried out, allowing for complementarily of target groups addressed by each tool. In this paper, the authors describe the research framework and the development process of the first global survey on MOOC design and explain how its results will inform a future common quality reference framework for improving, assessing and comparing MOOCs, which will itself lead to the development of a proposal for an international standard for MOOC design and delivery. At the EDEN conference, preliminary results of the surveys and semi-structured interviews conducted will be presented in detail.