MOOCathon: Crowdsourced Planning and Development of a MOOC Platform

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses or MOOC is a recent phenomenon in distance education in which a course can cater to a very large number of learners. To support the massive nature of MOOC, it needs a platform that is flexible and scalable both in the technological and pedagogical sense. In order to solicit as many ideas as possible for an ideal MOOC platform, crowdsourcing was applied both offline and online. Crowdsourcing utilizes the wisdom of the crowd as opposed to that of a single expert. A design-thinking workshop was conducted to identify the needs and features of the MOOC platform based on the combined experiences and ideas of the participants. MOOC students, teachers and enthusiasts participated in the said event. The development of the platform was achieved through a hackathon, in which several teams created different prototypes addressing the said needs. The output from the hackathon was evaluated in comparison to the existing University MOOC platform developed by a lone team.