The Diploma Centre offers a range of postgraduate courses to lawyers and other suitably qualified professionals. Since 2014 the Diploma Centre has delivered a free online course in a discrete topic annually that is open to all and specifically designed for large numbers to participate. To-date, the Diploma Centre’s MOOCs have attracted over 9000 participants from over 40 countries since they first launched in 2014. Our 2017 MOOC was entitled ‘Employment law in the digital era: Brexit, borders and offices without walls' – challenges and impacts in uncertain times’, the course was delivered over five weeks online and featured contributions from leading lawyers and employment law experts.
The learning environment and conditions educators create for students is essential to their success. This presentation will describe our experiences in running our biggest free online initiative yet, and how our ethos of ‘openness’ nurtured a community of learners. We will provide an overview of the challenges we faced, the factors that impacted on our design process, and describe how we used technological innovation to transform our Moodle platform into a welcoming environment which fostered learning and unprecedented levels of engagement. We will also report on the evaluation of the course and student feedback.
We sought to address the gaps that exist for students of free online programs by:
- Upgrading and customising our learning management system
- Using free video resources to ‘livestream’ content and introduce real-time interaction between lecturers and students.
- Encouraging students to consume weekly content through incentivising completion
A brand new online platform has been tailored to our students’ needs and offers an improved user interface in line with best instructional design theory. We harnessed our existing resources by using our own Moodle system, rather than a dedicated MOOC infrastructure.
Lunchtime live streams with employment law experts were filmed offsite using free resources such as YouTube and Open Broadcaster Software, allowing students to engage directly with lecturers.
Students would collect weekly badges to become eligible to purchase a digital Certificate of Completion, replacing our paper certificates from previous years and using technology to provide a cost-effective administration system.
The key performance indicators revealed very positive results:
- Over 3,000 student registered – our highest number to date;
- Greater than double the standard completion rate for typical MOOC programs[1];
- An increased number of international students/students based outside of Dublin;
- Record numbers of non-legal professionals;
- More peer-to-peer learning and online socialisation;
- Improved learning experience and student satisfaction;
- Higher certificate of completion sales, developed at lower cost.
[1] https://blog.edx.org/study-moocs-offers-insights-online-learner-engagement-behavior
Topics: Global Challenges in Higher and Further Education , Topics: Innovations and Design in Online and Blended Learning
