Validating MOOC-based Curriculum in Higher Education

Subject Areas : Distance Education

Esmaeil Jafari ¹ (Assistant Professor, Department of Technological Learning, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran)
Kourosh Fathi Vajargah ² (Professor, Department of Higher Education, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran)
Mahboobeh Arefi ³ (Associate Professor, Department of Higher Education, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran)
Morteza RezaeiZadeh ⁴ (Assistant Professor, Department of Higher Education, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran)

Received: 2017-09-27 Accepted : 2017-12-17 Published : 2017-10-23

Keywords: Higher Education, Grounded Theory, Validation, MOOC-based curriculum,

Abstract :

MOOCs are the beginnings of remarkable revolutions in the field of teaching-learning in higher education. Mooc-based curricula have provided new opportunities for facilitating independent learning and education motivation. So the purpose of the study is validating MOOC-based curriculum in higher education system. This is a combined and exploratory study. The grounded theory is used in the qualitative part and test pattern validation among the faculty members and PhD students of Tehran University are participated for quantitative studies. The statistical population included 14 professionals and experts in the field of educational technology and the quantitative part included all the faculty members and PhD students of Tehran Universities; so 214 of them were selected through stratified random sampling. A semi-structured interview was used for collecting data of qualitative part and the researcher questionnaire was used for quantitative part. The reliability and validity in qualitative part of the research was through reviewing by experts who did not participate in the study and it was calculated using Cronbach's alpha as 0.93 for the quantitative part. The content analysis was used for qualitative data analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to verify and test the conceptual model. The results are indicating 28 general categories of paradigm included causal conditions, the central phenomenon, underlying conditions, intervening conditions, strategies and outcomes that show the effective factors of MOOC-based curriculum and their relationship.

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