Instructional Quality Assessment Criteria for MOOCs

Abstract

MOOCs (massive open online courses) have recently garnered the attention of education authorities, policymakers, and planners. MOOCs have opened up new horizons for higher education, lifelong learning, and professional development because of being open, online, and massive and for facilitating access to education. However, there are major challenges to the quality of instruction provided by MOOCs. The present research was, therefore, an attempt to identify the criteria for the assessment of MOOCs. To this end, first the systematic review approach was used with several keywords namely "MOOC education quality", "MOOC success factors", and "MOOC opportunities" to search the Science Direct, Springer, Wiley, Google Scholar, and ERIC databases for three months. After filtering the retrieved references by title, abstract, and body, 19 valid articles were selected for the analysis and the criteria for the quality assessment of MOOCs were extracted. In the second research phase, the identified criteria were presented to 20 experts using the Delphi method and the data was analyzed using the agreement coefficients. According to the results, the experts agreed on 20 criteria which could be classified into three categories: 1) learning resources and content quality and accessibility, 2) diversity and proportionality of the learning activities, and 3) the learners' support system. Accordingly, the social context, organizational policies, and technologies are the three factors that interact with the educational elements to determine the quality of MOOCs. Suggestions are also provided in this research for future designers, producers, and researchers based on the research findings.