MOOC Design Challenges: Incorporating Collaboration and Gamification Aspects

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a great variety of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) offered by different providers such as MiriadaX, Coursera, or edX. They are materialized using different elements (talks like TEDx, digital textbooks or educational TV programs), which are designed and developed by an instructor as part of a series of digital videos. Videos are then made available to the students that will access them. However, the ideal situation is that MOOCs motivate collaboration processes involving both teachers and students, who participate in the design of the courses so that they can more effectively use these courses. To achieve this, the challenge is to incorporate collaboration aspects into MOOCs. This is not an easy task because it requires the design and organization of activities that motivate the collaboration among participants. Likewise, the motivational aspects are necessary to avoid courses dropout and favor learning. To this end, it is important to consider some gamification techniques that might be determinant to motivate learning. In this line, the proposal is the inclusion of collaboration and gamification techniques during MOOCs planning, design, implementation and use. This is integrated into a proposed technological architecture that facilitates ubiquitous learning, the Training and Learning Architecture (TLA).