Quality Assurance Methods Assessing Instructional Design in MOOCs that implement Active Learning Pedagogies: An evaluative case study

Abstract

Since more and more Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) appear, constituting an innovative part of online education, they should also undergo quality assurance to assess their pedagogical design similarly to other online courses. Recently, new studies have appeared presenting quality assurance methods (QA) for assessing the instructional design in MOOCs with pedagogical innovations, like those implementing active learning pedagogies (e.g. collaboration, gamification), which provide designers and instructors with useful strategies in order to design more interactive MOOCs. However, it is not that clear how these efforts are being addressed and up to which point are appropriate to assess active learning pedagogies. Therefore, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted to identify the most mature existing MOOC QA methods. Afterwards, an evaluative case study was carried out, based on the Evaluand-oriented Responsive Evaluation Model (EREM), to apply the selected methods to a MOOC implementing active learning pedagogies. As the results suggest, the instruments of the selected QA methods need enrichment to assess effectively the instructional design based on active learning pedagogies, by providing specific questions proper for this kind of MOOCs or, by stating the underlying pedagogical model clearly so that the designers could consider beforehand if it is appropriate or not for their case. The results of the study are a first step to define new, enriched quality assessment methods for MOOCs that apply active learning approaches.