The UnMOOCing Process: Extending the Impact of MOOC Educational Resources as OERs

José A. Ruipérez-Valiente, Sergio Martin, Justin Reich and Manuel Castro
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José A. Ruipérez-Valiente: Department of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Murcia (UMU), 30008 Murcia, Spain
Sergio Martin: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain
Justin Reich: Teaching Systems Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Manuel Castro: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 18, 1-17

Abstract: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) came into the educational ecosystem attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world. The original courses were completely open and free, targeting the worldwide population. However, current MOOC providers have pivoted towards more private directions, and we often find that MOOC materials are completely closed within their hosting platforms and cannot be retrieved from them by their learners. This diminishes the potential of MOOCs by making content available to a small proportion of learners and severely limits the reusability of the educational resources. In this paper, we present a process that we call ‘unMOOCing’, in which we transform the resources of a MOOC into OERs. We taught a MOOC on Open Education in the UNED Abierta platform, and we ‘unMOOCed’ all of its educational resources, making them available to download by the learners that are taking the course. The results of the unMOOCing were very encouraging: the possibility of downloading the course resources was the most highly rated component of the course. Additionally, the two unMOOCed materials that were considered as most useful (presentations and contents in a PDF) were downloaded by 90% of the learners. Now that the majority of MOOC providers are moving towards a more closed educational approach, we believe that this paper sends a powerful message for bringing back the original MOOC concept of ‘Openness’ with the unMOOCing process, thus contributing to the wider dissemination and democratization of education across the globe.

Keywords: open educational resources; unMOOCing; open education; massive open online courses; learning analytics; technology-enhanced learning; open courseWare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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