Developing a MOOC at Chalmers: Motivation and first experiences from a teacher’s perspective

Other conference contribution, 2015

An increasing number of universities around the globe produce and conduct Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Chalmers has followed this trend by starting to develop two MOOCs in 2014. While some research has attempted to assess the learners’ motivations to participate in MOOCs (e.g. Kizilcec et al. 2013), little is known about motivations, opportunities and challenges for teachers engaging in MOOC development. In this presentation, we will reflect upon this question drawing on the Chalmers MOOC “Sustainability in Everyday Life”. The MOOC aims to increase the learners’ capacity to appreciate the complexity of sustainability issues and to apply systems thinking and critical reflection on the information flow in public media. The pedagogical approach attempts to emphasize interactivity between learners with a minimum of teacher involvement. After brief introduction to MOOCs in general and at Chalmers in particular, the aim of this presentation is twofold: 1) from the teacher’s perspective, we share first experiences of developing a MOOC aimed at the general informed public, and 2) we identify issues with importance to pedagogical design, developing material and assessment. This is a first step in an action research program, which will be used to evaluate the benefits and challenges of MOOCs for teachers at Chalmers.