“How to Improve Students Learning Outcomes in Online Courses and MOOCs” was the title of the session by Zsuzsa Köpösdi, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Debrecen in Hungary. Köpösdi is an instructor of an online course that can be taken by students at 22 Hungarian universities and beyond. The research questions addressed in their presentation and MOOC study are:
Q1: What factors can improve students’ learning outcomes in online courses and MOOCs?
Q2: What methods can improve the effectiveness of MOOCs?
Q3: What are the advantages of creating, instructing, and managing a MOOC course?
Köpösdi described the course as a two-credit course created six years ago. The course is now available at 27 universities with Hungarian as the language of instruction. The course is managed in the MOOC system of the University of Debrecen. The course has been taught for eleven semesters at the time of recording. Köpösdi explained that in this and other MOOCs students “plan, manage, and control their own learning processes: they decide where, when, and with what schedule they study the learning material.” Köpösdi wanted to identify the factors and student characteristics associated with the successful completion of this type of course. The factors studied were academic procrastination, grit, self-regulated learning (SRL), motivation, student-instructor interaction. Köpösdi used online questionnaires with validated scales: the Academic Procrastination Scale-Short, Short Grit Scale, SRL Scale, among others. The surveys were implemented using Google Forms and were optional and anonymous. Köpösdi used Excel and R to process the data.
Köpösdi presented the results of the study as a table with the correlation coefficient for grit (weak positive, 0.3575), academic procrastination (weak-negative, -0.2115), and SRL (weak positive, 0.2672). In a second study, Köpösdi found that students’ intrinsic motivation is positively related to their learning performance. The impact of instructors’ interactions was addressed through emails with interesting articles, videos, and supplementary materials on the theme of the course or emails with “key sentences of the course material, motivational sentences and direct link to the course” resulting in a significant difference.
Köpösdi ended by describing the benefits of creating and managing a MOOC course, including new opportunities for research studies, connecting with students from different campuses, and exciting learning experiences. Köpösdi mentioned that the opportunity to design and teach a MOOC course is really worth the time investment. I think I would enjoy some aspects of a MOOC design, but I would also want and miss more and longer student-instructor and student-student interactions.
