From low-scale to collaborative, gamified and massive-scale courses: Redesigning a MOOC

Abstract

Despite the success of MOOCs to promote open leaning, they are usually criticized for their high drop-out rates and behaviorist pedagogical approach. Some active learning strategies, such as collaboration and gamification, have shown their potential to overcome some of these problems at low scale. However, the design and implementation of such strategies in MOOCs is still a challenge, which is being studied by several researchers, who tend to focus specially on the enactment of MOOCs. Therefore, there is a need for research studies exploring the design processes of MOOCs including active strategies. In this paper, we describe a co-redesign process in which an economic translation course conceived as a MOOC but finally implemented in Moodle for blended learning, was redesigned to include collaboration and gamification to implement it in Canvas Network (a MOOC platform). During the redesign process we found severe difficulties related to the scale, which were mainly caused by the initial implementation in a typical LMS.