Greek university MOOCs and secondary education teachers’ training

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been tremendously developed worldwide but this is not the case in Greece. Our aim is to investigate their features at the University area. Our ultimate target is to utilize the conclusions and make some specific suggestions regarding the way we can draw on our relevant experience of University Open Courses (UOC) so that the latter will be able to be converted into a Secondary Education (SE) Teachers’ distance - training database. To this aim, we attended MOOCs run by Mathesis, Coursity and the Ionion Universities. Our research aimed at externally describing the respective MOOCs’ features and comparing them with one another. Next, we compare these platforms to the Open eClass Learning Management System (OeC LMS)used by the UOC and we put forward methods to convert these Courses into MOOCs. Additionally, we investigate the cost, the required attendance time and the Certification of the MOOCs, research has taken place as to whether some of the OCs can be converted into MOOCs or Small Private Online Courses(SPOCs).From the conclusions drawn we see that Greek MOOCs have mainly been structured around the behaviouristic model. Suggestions have been made in the direction of collaborative learning with the creation of small groups of SE teachers of the same major, with the view to having OCs function as a database for SE teachers’ training via SPOC, drawing on experience derived from MOOCs.