Supporting the planning of hybrid-MOOCs learning designs

Abstract

This paper presents a work-in-progress solution for planning hybrid Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). The use of MOOCs in brick and mortar courses presents several design challenges. One of them is to find the most suitableonline course regarding the alignment with the face-to-face course structure, timelineand syllabus. Despite there are different lesson planning and design tools which support educators in the design of their courses, there is a lack of solutions allowing to incorporate the use of MOOC or MOOC resources in the planning processof blended courses. In this paper, we present aMOOC design module for being used in design authoring toolswhich aim to support theplanning of blended courses thatincorporate MOOCs (or MOOCs resources). We discuss twodifferent solutions for gathering information regarding existing MOOCs in the market: the creation of our own MOOC database versus the parsing of MOOC information from existing search engines on demand. Our exploration leadsus to discard the first solution as maintaining the database is highly demanding. Thus, the final system uses existing MOOC search engines to extract the online courses design information to later be used in the overall hybrid-course planning. As it is a work-in-progress article, we present and discuss our future steps for supporting educators in the of design hybrid MOOCs scenarios.