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There has been a rapid growth in the use of online learning tools at universities, which changes the way individuals teach and learn. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused distance education and open learning to become the norm. This situation showed the strengths and weaknesses of the online courses delivered by colleges and universities. Student learning needs and preferences are changing, and they need to be reflected in the design and the delivery of the courses. It is vital to recognize the role of learner in influencing the quality of learning via MOOCs (Liu, et al., 2014).
The aim of the study is to compare university students’ preferences for the learning design of LMOOCs and analyze whether there are differences considering three variables: sociocultural context, gender and educational stage. For this purpose, Reinders and Pegrum (2017) evaluation criteria for the learning design of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) resources is considered as the starting point. Based on these considerations, four hypotheses were postulated:
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Hypothesis 1 (H1): FL students’ preferences regarding LMOOCs can inform their future design to improve their quality.
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Hypothesis 2 (H2): FL students’ preferences regarding LMOOC design are different depending on their sociocultural context.
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Hypothesis 3 (H3): FL students’ preferences regarding LMOOC design are different depending on their gender.
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Hypothesis 4 (H4): FL students’ preferences regarding LMOOCs design are different depending on their educational stage.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), term coined in 2008 by Cormier and Alexander (Siemens, 2012), have come to stay supported by the development of educational technologies. The idea of MOOCs is not new - they are the natural evolution of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and movements such as the Open Course Ware (Fernández, & Webster, 2014). Although MOOCs have continued to evolve, their fundamental characteristics of being open, participatory and distributed usually at no charge (except for issuing certificates), have remained consistent (Bogdan, 2017). Learning is enhanced by participation, which is voluntary, and knowledge is distributed across a network of participants. MOOCs are available to any number of people worldwide, and their participation depends on their needs and interests as well as on the ability to connect to the Internet (Babori, et al., 2019).
Nonetheless, the difficulty that may arise when there are so many users on a course at the same time, as the diversity of learners requires methods for adaptation as there is no one-size-fits-all learning environment (Rüdian, et al., 2019). Criticism of MOOCs include (i) lack of pedagogical rigor and theoretical foundation (Colpaert, 2018; Mehta, 2017); (ii) low completion rates (Vickers, 2017; Poy, & Gonzales-Aguilar, 2014); the fact that even though MOOCs are designed for everyone and are to connect participants across continents and cultures, they are developed mostly by a white, male, English voice (Denek, & Hertzfeld, 2019); (iii) a hidden business model based on payments (Shah, 2017).
Despite their flaws, MOOCs continue to be popular among students and have the potential to transform university education. Recent reports by Shah (2019a, 2019b) show that the decline in the use of MOOCs might be exaggerated.