What is the future of MOOCs? Are MOOCs already yesterday’s news? Is the MOOC past its peak and on the rapid slope of disillusionment? This paper is set against the backdrop of these questions and the evolving debate over the future of the Massive Open Online Course (Shamrock, 2015). Firstly, it briefly reviews the current rhetoric reality gap between the so-called ‘state of the art’ and the ‘state of the actual’ and then explores some of the institutional drivers for the development of MOOCs. Secondly, the paper reports on how over the last 18 months Dublin City University (DCU) has developed a strategic institutional response to the challenges and opportunities presented by the MOOC movement. In so doing a description of the key drivers, strategic deliberations, and major decision points which informed the thinking at DCU is provided along with an outline of the advantages and disadvantages of different MOOC platforms (Brown, Costello, Donlon & Nic Giolla Mhichil, 2015). In sharing this institutional story we attempt to demonstrate the importance of aligning key decisions about how to respond to the new openness movement with well-defined institutional drivers, which in turn can help to identify the strategic affordances of different MOOC solutions. In the case of DCU this line of thinking, coupled with a strong institutional commitment to shaping the future rather than 'taking' the future, contributed to the decision to rise to the challenge of online learning by adopting a new MOOC platform known as Academy. This decision was primarily influenced by our desire to foster a strong ecology of innovation in teaching and learning based on the perspective of digital resilience (Weller & Anderson, 2013). Finally the paper describes the launch of the DCU Open Academy and the first suite of free online short courses currently underdevelopment. Importantly, the Open Academy initiative helps to illustrate how this new platform in the international MOOC landscape has greater potential to support local solutions and more targeted online courses in languages other than just English, which do not rely on the big platforms largely closed to all but elite institutions.
References
Brown, M., Costello, E., Donlon, E., & Nic Giolla Mhichil, M. (2015). A strategic response to MOOCs: How one European university is approaching the challenge. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16, (6), 98-115.
Sharrock, G. (2015). Making sense of the MOOCs debate. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 37, (5), pp. 597-609.
Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013). Digital resilience in higher education. European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 16 (1), 53-66.
Online Education (teaching, learning & assessment) , Further Education and Training
