Vocational knowledge improvement method on massive open online course for the thai tourism worker

Abstract

The adopted of Massive open online courses (MOOC) in the Thailand Tourism sector is aimed at promoting the quality of human resources to reach ASEAN tourism standard. However, traditional vocational education and training do not seem to provide knowledge improvement for many of the workers in the postmodern era since the completion rate of MOOC is very low. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a knowledge improvement method for knowledge workers who are working in the tourism industry. In this study, the cognitive load theory and interactive media were employed as methods which are able to improve the knowledge workers’ learning performance via mobile devices. Two experiments were performed in order to find the optimal length of video lectures and the effectiveness of interactive media in MOOCs. The first experiment was performed on sixty-four tourism industry knowledge workers who were divided into four groups randomly. Each group was loaded with different video lengths and different segmentations. The second experiment was done on the same focus group by separating them into control and experiment groups. The experiment group was assigned to use interactive media (2D learning game) right after watching the learning video. The results show that, by using the same amount of learning time, the group who were using the smaller video lengths performed significantly better due to lower consume of information. Differences in knowledge tests were examined across different conditions of video lengths to measure the learning performance. As a result, the groups which were equipped with interactive media achieved higher test scores than those without it. The evaluation method for the performance test was the same as in the first experiment. The results indicate that the interactive group with shorter of video lengths performed significantly better than the other group exposed to traditional online learning (using longer videos in a non-interactive manner).