A Principled Approach to the Design of Collaborative MOOC Curricula

• Published in: Digital Education: Out to the World and Back to the Campus Vol. 10254; pp. 58 - 67
• Main Authors: Håklev, Stian, Slotta, James D.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2017; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Collaborative learning; MOOCs; Scripting
• ISBN: 9783319590431; 331959043X
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-59044-8_7

MOOCs have the potential to benefit from the large number of very diverse learners that participate in courses, but this requires a principled approach to MOOC curriculum development. Courses need to take into consideration the diversity of learner experience and intentions, and incorporate scripts that both benefit from the large numbers of learners (crowd-sourcing), as well as enabling small-scale intense collaboration. The real challenge is tying together a set of learning activities and the development of a community knowledge base, with the specific curriculum learning goals of the course. This paper offers a pragmatic approach to developing courses, based on the experience of a MOOC for teacher professional development.