The education sector globally is facing a lot of challenges: the challenge of numbers, of relevance, of quality, of access, of costs and of speed. The solution to these multiple challenges probably lies in a number of disruptive innovative solutions. These include inculcating self-learning (building on meta-cognition), measuring learning, collaborative and co-operative learning, personalisation of learning and learning analytics. However, in addition to new systems or technologies, we need a fundamental change of perspective. A very promising technological and pedagogical model that has received a lot of attention during the last few years and adoption by Stanford, Harvard, Duke and almost 100 of the world's top ranking Universities to teach millions of learners is that of the MOOC.
The Open Educational Resources have become an important part of educational delivery. The establishment of OER University is a milestone in that direction. There are hundreds of OER repositories to allow teachers and students to use, and adopt content. Keeping in view the significance of OERs, we organized The OER MOOC with the purpose to enhance knowledge about OERs and to equip for effective use and adopt OERs in ones programs as well as to be able to create your own OERs and contribute to the pool of OER resources. We further wanted to explore the potential of MOOCs to create a model of simultaneously teaching on-site and off-site learners, using synchronous and a-synchronous teacher learner interactions to deliver high quality learning to large numbers, maybe evolve a model for a classroom of 10,000 learners. In this study, we shall elaborate on our methodology, outcomes and the impact factors The OER MOOC had on the learners.
Journal or Publication Title
Proceedings of the 2nd Regional Symposium on Open Educational Resources: Beyond Advocacy, Research and Policy (24-27 June 2014; Penang, Malaysia)