MOOCs Lack Interactivity and Collaborativeness: Evaluating MOOC Platforms

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have considered to being a potential to disseminate engineering education at scale. However, the pedagogical requirement demanded engineering student to equip with specific skill sets such as communication, interactivity and collaboration. Yet, MOOCs are skeptical of facilitating those skills. Generally, MOOCs evaluated against accessibility and usability. These evaluations may not perceive whether the platform designs in MOOCs supports to much needed interactions and collaboration required in engineering education. We evaluated 6 MOOC platform designs under the lens of collaboration and types of interactions which occur as learner to learner, learner to instructor, learner to platform and learner to content. Evaluation criteria were derived using previous frameworks and evaluations were conducted using 10 participants. Based on each criteria a matrix was formed with a weight to compare results. We found overall collaboration opportunities in platforms are significantly less than the opportunities to interact. Based on the findings we provide 5 design recommendations and provide a future direction for MOOC platform designs which enables facilitation to engineering education through MOOCs.