MOOCS and Higher Education Globalisation: Social Work and Social Education Students’ Perspectives

Descripción

MOOCs can support educational innovation in a wide range of contexts, from formal to informal and from expected to unexpected. This kind of open online courses are often used within campus modules as core elements of their curriculum. This is the case of this experimental study, where we analyse an experiment of HE educational innovation about the perceptions of students around strengths and weaknesses of MOOCs in socio-educational settings. 54 students were surveyed with multiple choice questions around this topic. The results show that HE students of education degrees tend to see the potential of MOOCs to aid the transformation of the classrooms often currently reserved to social elites. They also see that MOOCs can transcend to new learning arenas more ubiquitous, connected, informal and horizontal, which can facilitate the digital inclusion of disenfranchised groups, as well as potentiate the blooming of interactive communities of collective intelligence. However, these students were also aware of important shortcomings such as the lack of monitoring, and MOOC´s often unattainable demand of high learner autonomy.