The Quality of Online Courses
Online courses are offering new opportunities to learn for many people.
Our leading question is:
How can we improve the quality of online learning and the courses?
We have collaborated with more than 10.000 online learners, designers, facilitators and providers to develop instruments and tools for beginners as well as for experts in online learning.
Her you can find our main results, all with open license for free download, sharing and re-usage:
The Checklist for Beginners in Online Learning
The Quality Criteria for Experts in Online Learning
The Quality Reference Framework for MOOCs
And your can find our detailed results from our Mixed Methods Research here:
Our scientific publications on the quality of online learning
About the Quality of MOOCs
The new term MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) has immediately attracted the masses even though it is just another label for a diversity of different online learning scenarios and methodologies that were already developed and implemented many years before.
MOOCs can be considered and defined as a special type of E-Learning, raising a new interest and offering opportunities to (again) reach learners that are attracted by E-Learning solutions due to many reasons. Thus, MOOCs can be the enablers for a renaissance of E-Learning even though their completion rates are very low and their general quality is questionable and currently under lively debate.
Nowadays, different types of MOOCs (so called cMOOCs and xMOOCs) are discussed but the focus is still on the masses, technology and promised innovations that are not easily to discover: Most MOOCs are lacking continuous tutoring and support for all learners who are expected to teach themselves.
Not only the high drop-out rates have raised the question of quality for MOOCs and several international conferences (such as LINQ 2014) had a special focus on MOOCs. On the other hand MOOCs have prepared the future path for opening up education.
As often criticized for their quality (e.g. by Daniel 2012 and Stracke 2015), the European initiative MOOQ for the quality of MOOCs is focusing to make MOOCs better.
Thus, MOOQ has started to develop a common Quality Reference Framework for improving, assessing and comparing the quality of MOOCs in the future.