This document summarizes a study on the pedagogical design challenges of open online courses (MOOCs). It examines three open online courses on composing educational resources, learning environments and networks, and learning analytics. The challenges explored are creating community engagement, monitoring participation and content, designing adaptive materials and activities, and providing feedback. Case studies of each course describe their design approaches to addressing these challenges through tools like blogs, forums, and video conferences. The conclusions emphasize that open online course designs must support planned learning activities with carefully selected online tools and see openness as an opportunity rather than a threat.

1. Open Online Courses: Responding to
Design Challenges
Terje Väljataga, Hans Põldoja, Mart Laanpere
Tallinn University, Estonia

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3. What are open online
courses?

4. MOOC
Massive Open Online Course

5. Pedagogical design
challenges

6. Creating and sustaining
community gravity
• How to design sustainable community gravity?
• What are the mechanisms for bringing and keeping
together distributed groups?
• What are the tools and techniques that facilitate
and support the emergence of strong community
gravity?

7. Monitoring participation and
content flows
• What are the possible technological solutions for
both students and facilitators to monitor
participation, observe content flows and
comprehend the overall course progress?
• How a course design can contribute to support
monitoring heterogeneous landscapes of tools and
services, student created content and their flows?

8. Designing materials and
activities
• To what extent the material and activities are pre-
defined before the course starts?
• To what extent students’ created and
recommended activities should be included into
this emergent course design?

9. Providing feedback
• What type of feedback is realistic and required in
open courses?
• Who should provide feedback and how often?
• How to increase the quality of feedback given by
facilitators and participants?

10. Multiple case study

11. Research design
• Multiple cases study method (Cohen, Manion &
Morrison, 2007)
• 3 open online courses
• Focus on 4 design challenges

12. Three cases

13. Composing free and
open online educational
resources

14. http://oercourse.wordpress.com

15. Course design
• Wikiversity for planning and running the course
• Course blog and personal blogs for all participants
• Weekly blog posts and summaries
• Personal introductions
• Blogroll and OPML file for monitoring
• Video conference at the end of the course

16. Learning environments
and learning networks

17. http://opikeskkonnad.wordpress.com

18. Course design
• Course blog and personal blogs for all participants
• Weekly blog posts and summaries
• Personal learning contracts
• Four contact days in addition to online activities
• EduFeedr for managing and following the course
(Põldoja, 2010)
• Group assignment in addition to blogging
• Good feedback from the facilitators

20. Social network

21. Learning & knowledge
analytics

22. http://www.learninganalytics.net

23. Course design
• The participants were free to decide on their level
of participation
• No required assignments
• Moodle forum and Twitter as main communication
tools
• Daily summary posts by the facilitators
• Weekly video conferences with external experts

24. Conclusions

25. Conclusions
• Open online courses require redesigning the
traditional patterns of learning and teaching
• Online tools must be carefully selected to support
planned learning activities
• Participants see openness as an opportunity, not as
a threat

26. References
• Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K. (2007). Research methods in education.
New York: T & F Books UK.
• Põldoja, H. (2010). EduFeedr: following and supporting learners in open blog-
based courses. In Open ED 2010 Proceedings. Barcelona: UOC, OU, BYU.

27. Thank You!
Terje Väljataga Hans Põldoja Mart Laanpere
terje.valjataga@tlu.ee hans.poldoja@tlu.ee mart.laanpere@tlu.ee
http://terjevaljataga.eu @hanspoldoja @martlaa
http://www.hanspoldoja.net