From MOOCs to mainstream: Educational and enterprise design thinking

Mark King and Bob Fox
University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia

This paper focuses on the educational and enterprise design thinking surrounding massive open online courses (MOOCs) at the University of New South Wales. Our engagement in the MOOC space has provided opportunities to trial new ways of working, as well as building institutional and staff capability and capacity. Within the educational domain, the MOOCs platform has allowed for developing and testing new curricula, feedback, assessment and governance, and related technology solutions that directly inform on-campus learning and teaching. At the enterprise level, partnerships made between higher education institutions and commercial platform providers create unique challenges, not only in terms of equity and access but also in matters related to copyright, intellectual property and exposure to the world.

This paper explores our involvement with MOOCs as a vehicle for ‘controlled experimentation’ and doing things differently that can stimulate and lead to change in mainstream learning and teaching. The MOOCs themselves are not seen as necessarily innovative, but they provide the opportunity for offering courses in non-traditional ways, open to all, anywhere, with potential links to the institution’s conventional award-bearing programmes. This paper then focuses on the underlying values for institutions being involved in MOOCs. The benefits can be subtle and include new opportunities to develop curricula beyond the domain of the faculty, with central service involvement providing specialist skills in new pedagogies and new technology applications.

When MOOCs are used to support mainstream on-campus course development, they can in turn lead to better developed and quality-assured blended courses. In addition, central services can ensure that matters of copyright, disability laws and intellectual property have been addressed and the use of educational technology is appropriately developed to enhance the student learning experience within a proven learning design model, outlined in the paper. Experience with MOOCs can accelerate the development and enhancement of institutional capacity for change and growth in educational applications across all disciplines, while simultaneously advancing staff capabilities in working in larger curriculum design teams with multiple inputs from different specialists.

In summary, the educational and enterprise design thinking that surrounds MOOC development can act as a catalyst for change; and what is learned in one MOOC can be used to support improvements in the development of another MOOC. The MOOC experience can also throw new light on the structure of the curriculum and offer new possibilities for developing varied levels of participation in a course, from a free involvement open to all from around the world, to a certified course for professional development, to becoming core to mainstream courses. Leveraging the opportunities MOOCs offer to trial and develop new practices, new models of learning and teaching, as well as new ways for thinking about courses and the relationships between courses and programmes are major learning opportunities that should not be missed.