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The massive open online course (MOOC) emerged in 2012 and has become an important supplement to global higher education. In China, MOOC platforms have promoted educational equity by making course resources accessible. Suddenly, universities around the world began to turn their attention to MOOC, or started to create MOOC, or set up their own MOOC platform. Coursera, Udacity, and edX came into being, becoming the world’s most prominent MOOC giants (Tieman et al., 2018). Chinese universities began to test MOOCs in 2013. XuetangX of Tsinghua University, Good University Online of Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Chinese University MOOC of the Ministry of Education were born one after another. As an alliance of colleges and universities in the East and West, which relates to college credits, it has been unanimously recognized by universities for its mixed teaching methods (Thomas & Nedeva, 2018; Ye et al., 2023). As a result, many universities have introduced large-scale online open courses in the formal higher education field. Under the strategic background of Internet+, MOOC has become the vane of educational technology reform (Kim & Moon, 2019).
The MOOC has transformed the traditional teaching method, converting the classroom into a learning club where the teacher acts as a support staff member. It is no longer a collective lecture, and the discussion between teachers and students, along with the answers to questions, becomes the mainstream of the classroom; the professional orientation of teachers is no longer limited to traditional roles of instructors or mentors. Some excellent teachers may become freelancers literally; for learners, they will also have more flexible independent choice of learning content, which is no longer limited to the knowledge on the textbooks; besides, the limitations of learning time, place and form have been unprecedentedly liberated; online test has become the main form of assessment, and the former closed-book or open-book test with unified time and content has become one of the auxiliary ways of learning effect assessment (Watted, & Barak, 2018). In China, the development of MOOC relies on policy support and localized practices, forming a unique path. Local platforms represented by Chinese University MOOC explore the integration model of MOOC and traditional education by integrating high-quality university resources and combining Chinese cultural backgrounds. The Xuetang Online platform launched by Tsinghua University not only offers technical courses but also attempts to incorporate humanities and art courses into the MOOC system. However, compared with international platforms, the Chinese MOOC platform is still weak in the development of art courses. Although the MOOC platform provides an unprecedented opportunity for global access to high-quality educational content, issues such as low completion rates and limited student participation have been documented.
As an emerging online education model, MOOC has been widely applied in various academic fields (Hone & El Said, 2016). In addition to music majors, MOOC platforms also provide introductory music courses for students of other majors, helping them become well-rounded talents. However, in art professional courses, especially music history theory courses, the application of MOOCs still faces many challenges. On the one hand, music history theory courses are highly professional and theoretical, requiring rich teaching resources and interactive methods to help students understand and master knowledge; on the other hand, the traditional music teaching model is teacher-centered, making it difficult to meet the diverse learning needs of students. Therefore, introducing MOOC technology into music history theory courses can give full play to the advantages of online education while bringing new changes to music teaching. Given the broad application prospects of the MOOC in education, this study focuses on music history theory courses. It also explores the design of MOOC-based music history theory courses and analyzes college students’ willingness to enroll through questionnaires. The study further analyzes how MOOC technology can provide new teaching models and learning experiences for music professional education.