Making MOOCs

What does it take to make a MOOC? Explore the Grow-your-own MOOC kit here

Grow-your-own MOOC kit

Data and sense-making

Key questions:  What data will you collect about participant activity? Will you require ethics approval? How will you use feedback to improve and sustain the course?  How will you measure the impact or effectiveness?

Although MOOC space is usually free to participate and open in nature, there should still be an ethical consideration to using participant data. If you intend to survey or profile participants and to use this data elsewhere, you should consider making this clear as a courtesy.

A.

Evaluation planning

Decide on the measures for success that you will evaluate the course on, from the start and what information you will need to evaluate this success.

B.

Platform activity reports

Detailed data may be available on hosted platforms, for distributed platforms you may need to allow time to crunch and merge data together in order to gain a level of analysis.  Patterns in data, visual and statistical analysis can be useful to look at in terms of how participants engaged and used along with web server logs to gauge use of materials.

C.

Participant profiling

Using surveys and sign up information (e.g. user profile pages) to identify participant demographics and activity.

D.

Participant satisfaction

Providing a mechanism for feedback, as well as evaluating and responding to the feedback can be difficult with a large cohort, so allow scope to analyse and process this information if collected.

E.

Follow-up survey

This can be useful, and managed through the MOOC platform and/or social media tools, to determine what impact the course had on personal or professional development for participants.