This document discusses facilitating MOOCs and local support to help address barriers that some groups face in accessing MOOCs. It suggests that MOOCs favor those who are digitally literate, have strong English skills and academic backgrounds. To help address this, it proposes building local study groups and communities, providing translation and language support, offering supplemental materials like webinars to help with study skills, and enabling regional adaptations of MOOCs through open platforms. This would help open up MOOCs and make them more accessible to broader groups of learners.

1. Facilitated MOOCs and local support
Alastair Creelman
Linnaeus University, Sweden
alastair.creelman@lnu.se
Twitter: @alacre

2. CC BY-NC-ND Some rights reserved by Cat Burton on Flickr
The promise of open

3. CC BY Some rights reserved by Tim Green aka atoach
Those who most need
open education don’t
know it exists

4. MOOCs:
crowded, intimidating,
confusing
CC BY Some rights reserved by Alessandro Vasaturo

5. CC BY-NC-ND Some rights reserved by inheritancemag
MOOC barriers
MOOCs favour those with
• Study skills
• Digital literacy
• English as native language
• University degree/academic
background
• Good internet access
• Good income
Read:
Socioeconomic Status and MOOC Enrollment: Enriching Demographic
Information with External Datasets.
John Hansen & Justin Reich (Harvard university)

6. Building communities
CC BY Some rights reserved by wildxplorer
Empathy Security Peer support Privacy

7. Safe bubbles in a sea of
openness
CC BY-NC-SA Some rights reserved by Jez Page

8. MOOC ecosystems
Special interest groupsLanguage
support
Translation
Local study
groups
For-credit spin-offs
CC BY-NC Some rights reserved by Nick Hobgood
Study skills
Webinars

9. Linguistic diversity
– a community approach
• Google Translator Toolkit
• Coursera translator
community
• Open EdX
• TED Open translation
project
• Khan Academy translation
• Amara subtitle editor
CC BY-NC Some rights reserved by nofrills

10. Opening up MOOCs
• Open course platforms to
enable regional adaptations
e. g. MOOC for development
(Commonwealth of learning)
• Tools to allow smaller
languages to exploit MOOCs
• Learning together:
MOOC Meetups
• Wrapped MOOCs
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11. Questions?
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