Evaluation of a MOOC on “Sustainability in Everyday Life” - The teachers’ experiences

Paper in proceeding, 2016

Universities all over the world have been developing Massive Online Open Courses, MOOCs. In this paper, we discuss our experiences during the production of and running the MOOC “Sustainability in everyday life”, that was developed at Chalmers University of Technology. The MOOC ran over a period of 7 weeks, from early June until late July, 2015 and attracted about 9000 participants. The purpose of this paper is (1) to describe and evaluate the further development and content production, and subsequent running of the course; and (2) to share our experiences of running a MOOC for the first time. An action research approach, that focuses on the experience of the teachers, was combined with information obtained from the course statistics, and from the course evaluations by the participants. This approach was used to identify the challenges that were met during the development of the course material and running the MOOC. The results show that, on the one hand, the major challenges were the planning of the content production process and the formulation of the assignments. On the other hand, although time consuming, the production of the video content was perceived as a nice activity. The course statistics and evaluations by the MOOC participants reflected the teachers’ experiences to some extent, and this information can be used to improve the MOOC. The role of MOOCs in higher education for sustainable development (HESD) is not yet clear. This paper demonstrates that developing a MOOC from scratch is a complex process, and adaptation of on-campus courses may be a feasible alternative, thus making already existing courses more widely available.