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Evaluation and field trials of MOOC Platforms in the Spanish-speaking community
Ignacio Despujol, Carlos Turro, Jaime Busquets and Vicent Botti
ing on the edition. In general there are more men than
women (60/40%) but this depends on the course, there
are people of all ages but most students are between 20
and 40 years old.
Most students have university education and there isn’t
a prevalence of any group of employment status (28,3%
unemployed, 14,7% civil servants, 32,2% company employed,
6,6% self employed, 15,5.students, 0,7% retired
and 2,0% other). Their main motivation to enroll is to
learn and then to improve at work.
Student satisfaction
As stated, we received the student’s opinions via an online
survey. We asked them about the courses (length of videos,
quality of videos, scheduling of contents, level of difficulty
of assessments, quality of doubt answering options
and difficulty level of the course), about their learning (if
they have learnt and if they like the learning system), if
their expectations have been fulfilled, the time devoted to
the course and about their experience using the platform
(the browser they used, platform speed, platform usability
and problems using it).
The results were consistent across the 3 editions Overall,
96% of the students liked the experience. Other important
data from MiriadaX ed. are depicted below:
A lot Yes Not
much
Do you feel you have learnt 25,1% 52,9% 21,55%
Do you like the videos 23,9% 63,6% 12,5%
Video scheduling
(OK/Slow/Fast)
84,2% 2,4% 13,4%
Video length (OK/Short/Long) 89,4% 5% 5,6%
Assessments
(OK/Easy/Difficult)
Doubt answering
(OK/slow/Not enough)
80,2% 16,5% 3,3%
69,5% 22,6% 7,9%
Difficulty (OK/Easy/Hard) 90,9% 8,2% 0,9%
The mix of people that answered the satisfaction survey
was different in every edition. In the first, all passed the
course, in the second we had a 11% of people answering
that hadn’t finished, and in the third we had 38,8% of
people answering that hadn’t finished the courses. Even
though we had a lot more people that hadn’t finished the
courses, the above results stayed consistent. The only
significant difference we observed was in the expectation
fulfilment question (from 1 to 5), where the average was
4,2 in the first edition, 4,12 in the second edition if we take
into account all the answers, 4,18 if we consider only the
ones from people that passed the course and 4,05/4,18
in the third edition. The main cause for not finishing the
course was lack of time (89% in MiriadaX and 83% in
GCB), and then platform errors (7% in both cases).
Most of the courses are designed to take three hours
a week of work. If we only take data from people who
passed the course, and don’t take into account the Android
course of the MiriadaX edition that required quite a
lot more work (5,37 hours a week on average), we get an
average dedication of 3,3 hours in one edition and 3,6 in
other. In the MiriadaX edition and taking into account the
Android course the distribution of answers was:
Hours you
have dedicated
Conclusions
>10h
7 to
10 h
5 to 7 h 3 to
5 h
Less
than 3
2,7% 7,7% 16,3% 43,3% 30%
Making a MOOC requires a lot of effort on the part of the
teachers, so it is very important to let them focus on what
they are experts in. Having a system like Polimedia, that
relieves all the video technology hurdles from them and
adapting every process to what they are used has helped
us to be able to create and deploy MOOCs very fast. With
Course Builder is very easy to deploy a MOOC, so is a
very good option to test and learn, but it lacks a lot of features
to deploy a complete MOOC platform. Google App
engine is cheap, simple and robust.
Using an intermediate format to save course metadata
and scripts to generate each platform’s specific code has
proved to be a very flexible solution to migrate from one
platform to another. It also helps teachers to structure the
course information and facilitates giving them the level
of support they choose. It is important that the platform
used has extensive content exporting/importing capabilities.
We have demographic data and completion rate data
that are similar to that of the big platforms. As with them
we have a low completion to enrollment ratio. The main
reason to not finishing is lack of time. Our enrollments
come mostly from Spain; we have to improve our communication
strategy in Latin America as we have found a
strong interest in the enrolled students from the region.
Sharing a platform with other universities increases visibility
and enrollment. Over any technical and organizational
issue, students like this new way of learning, even if
they don’t pass the courses.
There is room for improvement in the platform arena.
We are planning to migrate to OpenEdX as it has a lot of
the features we need and it is creating a very strong community
of users. As the Sakai CLE community is planning
to incorporate MOOC capabilities to the project we haven’t
closed the door to use a future version of Sakai CLE
as our MOOC platform. Having two different platforms
(MOOC and LMS) where the teachers have to deploy
Experience Track |212