Wearable technology in education to enhance technical MOOCs

Abstract

The low completion rate issue in MOOCs has become one of the main highlights by researchers. It is reported that only 10 to 15 percent of the students were able to complete the MOOCs. This low completion rate is due to the students are less engaged with the MOOCs content causing them to become demotivated to complete the whole MOOCs. Engaging students in MOOCs environment, especially for non-technical subjects, suited very well. However, for technical MOOCs, it involves significant challenges because technical MOOCs must be able to offer the students with practice-oriented learning outcome in-order for the MOOCs to be effective and engaging. Due to the above issue, this paper discussed an improvised MOOCs model for teaching technical subjects with the intervention in the use of wearable technology. A discussion on the e-content and e-activity of the technical MOOC learning design was presented. This study implemented the proposed technical MOOC model through the MOOC development. The students' perception of the technical MOOC was then evaluated, and all the results were explained in the discussion part. Results of the correlation test revealed that all of the technical MOOC variables correlated substantially and held a positive relationship with students' perception variable with r=.3 to 1.0, p < .0005. In addition, this result also suggests that the learning materials produced by wearable technology do contribute towards the positive effect of students' perception when learning technical MOOC.