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MOOC Experience in the University of Cantabria
Sergio Martinez and Fernando Cañizal
use it through the right marketing policies. And here
MOOCs can help.
b. Knowledge transference. Open initiatives make works
widely accessible, not only for students, but for all of
society. Public universities are supported basically with
public funds and, for that reason the results of their activities
must go back to society. Thus, OER have to be
part of the social mission of the universities.
c. Education Innovation and better educational materials.
Professors working in these initiatives try to improve
their materials because of their global dissemination. In
our case they also have the help of two technological
departments.
d. New educational methods. Working with 3,000 or
10,000 students is an experience never seen before.
Students can give very interesting information and it is
also very interesting to study their behaviour (Big Data
analysis).
Disadvantages:
a. If a University wants to participate in OCW or MOOCs
it must assume some costs. First of all, it is necessary a
technological department to develop these initiatives,
unless you let professors to participate freely and without
help - and this is not the best way to achieve good
results. Second, if you want to work with your own platform,
you have to assume the cost of its development.
In our opinion, Spanish universities usually make big
efforts developing things that are already developed.
We thought that it is better to collaborate with companies
(like Miriada X, Udacity or Coursera) than develop
your own software. Moreover, the broadcasting is always
better through a common platform than through
individual ones, especially if your partners are Banco
Santander and Telefonica. And third, it is necessary to
think about the work professors should do to create
courses.
b. MOOCs, OCW or Open repositories are only a small
part of professors’ activities, which also include research,
classes, virtual classrooms, conferences and
meetings. It is thus necessary to reward conveniently
these activities if we want to keep these professors engaged
in innovation activities.
c. The last disadvantage, if you choose a common platform,
is that you have to adapt your expectations to the
platform, and you have to accept that not everything
you want to do can be done. In our experience, we have
had some arguments but finally the collaboration has
worked out fine.
Are MOOCs Open Educational Resources
Hewlett’s updated OER definition begins (1): “ OER are
teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in
the public domain or have been released under an intellectual
property license that permits their free use and
re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include
full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks,
streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools,
materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge”.
The idea behind OER is really simple: educational materials
can be used almost without any conditions and freely.
So they should be libres (accessible and reusable) and gratis
(available at no-cost). This is clear in OCW, but not so
obvious in MOOCs.
The problem between OCW and MOOC is the meaning
we choose for the term “Open”. In OCW the meaning
is crystal clear: free, accessible and reusable. In MOOCs,
Open means free (the materials, at least) and accessible
(during the course timetable), but we are not sure if they
are reusable or not. The wikipedia definition for MOOC
says (2):
Although early MOOCs often emphasized open access
features, such as open licenses of content, open structure and
learning goals and connectivism, to promote the reuse an remixing
of resources, some notable newer MOOCs use closed
licenses for their course materials, while maintaining free access
for students.
For us, working with open licenses in MOOCs has benefits.
In the Creative Commons website we can see some
of them (3):
• OER can increase the reach of their materials by making
the rights to use and adapt them crystal clear from
the start;
• OER will be able to serve even more learners because
they will be granting legal permissions to use their
course content in other educational settings; and
• You do not have to respond to individual permission
requests from users and can instead focus on delivering
quality educational content to the largest number
of students.
Besides, if we use open licenses we allow others to
transform the work. Doing this, it is possible, for example,
to translate the courses to other languages, increasing the
impact.
Experience Track |251