Cultivating Active Learning and Learner-Centered Pedagogical Practices on MOOCs

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have innovated the field of education. These courses are delivered online, attracting students from around the world in a single course. We argue that the design of these courses should leverage student-centered pedagogies that encourage fostering critical and analytical skills, two important twenty-first-century learning characteristics. The goal is not only to deliver a content-driven course but also to promote active learning through three types of learner-centered interaction: learner-content, learner-instructor, and learner-learner. Applying concepts and information entail guiding the learners and increasing their responsibility for their own learning. An example of learner-instructor interaction is feedback given by the discussion led by the instructor. Assigned collaborative activities such as small-group projects and group problem-solving assignments could enhance the learner-to-learner interaction.

1. Introduction

Increasingly, massive open online courses (MOOCs) are gaining more attention from researchers in the field, although some are approaching them with less enthusiasm than others. MOOCs are often described with a tone of criticism as “disruptive innovation,” which has given a warranty to the speculation floating around the literature about its negative influence on higher education—even though the technology itself is far from disruptive. Understandably, a platform that follows a didactic structure around its content development, curriculum design, and assessment could raise legitimate questions about the viability of its pedagogical approach. Especially true that we live in an era of learner-centered pedagogies in our face-to-face settings with stupendously successful results. However, many negative views became more convinced about the opportunities MOOCs offer amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Having forced many countries around the world to shift from offline to online classes, online learning, and by extension MOOCs, has proven their utility in offering affordable access to learning and knowledge. And this led to their current status: MOOCs have become more relevant in higher education and lifelong learning, particularly in engendering twenty-first-century learning characteristics.

These learning characteristics could be described by the four Cs of twenty-first-century skills: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication. However, as things currently stand, MOOCs are still facing an apparent pedagogical limitation that can hardly be reflective of learner-centered learning due to factors associated with the invariability of culture and discourse. The internal design of MOOCs is intended for students regardless of their geographical location and cultural background. Its exterior, by contrast, that is, its content design and discourse is rather facilitated within an Anglo-Saxon mindset. This may preclude the inclusion of students whose learning contexts such as Asia and the Middle East come with vastly different experiences. Hence, the current pedagogical apparatus of MOOCs, we argue, are in dire need of the active learning approach in order to develop and nurture the twenty-first-century skills.

In this chapter, we are adopting the activity theory to argue that to accommodate cultural and discoursal variability, the student’s learning experience must exist in a virtual social fabric in which they interact, engage, and belong to a community of practice within the MOOCs environment. Activity theory is viewed from the perspective of the student and their interaction with other peers, the instructor, as well as the content. This chapter is divided into three sections: The first section delivers a propitious view of the pedagogical framework that should be used in designing MOOC platforms. The second section investigates the cultural, pedagogical, and technological limitations in non-Anglo-Saxon learning contexts. Finally, the third section draws on the first two in cultivating active learning, as informed by activity theory and in consideration of the aforementioned limitations.

2. Current pedagogical frameworks in designing MOOC platforms

Theories that emphasize self-learning using technology have influenced MOOCs. Many of these theories were based on philosophical and hypothetical concepts that promote individual learning. However, learning online is not isolated from what happens in the actual classroom. Students still need to interact with each other and exchange thoughts and ideas, and this is what would help them to construct meaningful learning. The social aspect, even in an online setting, is an essential component of learning, as many learning theories have indicated. MOOCs students need to communicate with each other and the professor to become part of the community and to complete the course. One of these theories is activity theory, which argues that learning occurs when an individual is part of the community and through a social context. It refers to a variety of sociocultural theoretical perspectives that address real-world complexity.

According to Engeström, communication is a specific human activity necessary to be considered as part of the community. Specifically, activity theory emphasizes group versus individual on cognition and constructs real-world experience. Furthermore, it refers to a psychological framework based on the concept that humans are defined by the activities they perform on objects in the real world and by the tools used to accomplish these activities. In addition, these activities occur within the social, cultural, and historical contexts that give them meaning [1]. The following theory model displays the interactions between the different elements, which are the subject and the object mediated by the community. All the interactions between the subjects should follow structured instructions and collaborate in the community (Figure 1) [2].

Figure 1.

Activity theory model adopted from Jaworski and Potari [2].

This chapter adopts the model of the activity theory as a framework that explains how the students learn as part of the social context. According to the activity theory model, in MOOCs, a student is the subject, and the student is using an online tool to reach a certain learning outcome. In addition to the tools, the theory model emphasizes different components, which are the community, rules, and collaboration. MOOCs are mostly offered by American institutions where the instruction pedagogies influenced by the teaching approaches are common in the American education system. However, a massive number of the registered students in this class are from different countries that are following different teaching approaches such as grading, class participation requirements, and others. Also, cultural sensitivities and teaching pedagogical differences should be in consideration [3]. Setting up the rules and course policy would limit the student’s dropout and help the students to reach a desired outcome [4].

Since MOOC is an open learning opportunity that allows students worldwide to register for a course, it is worth considering the students’ community. Addressing the different aspects that the activity theory might help in designing and developing these courses and, therefore, enhance the students’ engagement. The model should clarify how the students interact and actively participate in online classes. Activity theory indicates that students should not only be cognitively engaged to learn rather than make meaning of their learning by engaging in a community. This requires the MOOCs students to stay active in terms of the class communication. MOOCs classes are like any other online learning context in which students should use email, discussion forums, or blogs to communicate. Students who registered for the MOOC were required to create their network and seek the answers to their questions. Studying online in MOOCs is not a linear approach to teaching, as it does not offer class content in the traditional way. Therefore, MOOCs instructors should consider creating a class structure that allows students to interact with each other. Assigning a group assignment or project would provide the opportunity for the registered students to be actively engaged with each other. Offering the students step-by-step instructions and setting up the expectations of their role as online students may help them to stay active. Setting up the rules and regulation is another aspect that activity theory emphasizes. It is very critical for online students to manage the expectations of their responsibilities. They have to be aware of how to collaborate, complete their tasks, and reach the goals by achieving the intended learning outcomes [5].

The MOOCs instructors have to be aware of the challenges that may face their students in such an online context, which involves a large number of students. The main challenges that many registered students in MOOC courses may face are the lack of the instructor present, self-efficacy, and computer and English literacy as mentioned earlier in this chapter, especially for the students in the Middle East or other developing countries [6].

In a traditional classroom, the presence of the instructor would make the communication and collaboration inside the classroom easier with less efforts from the students. Usually, the instructor gives instructions at the same time as the class and arranges the class communication between the students inside the classroom. This would help the students be cognitively focused. However, in an online context such as MOOC with a large number of students registered, instructors should create a learning environment that encourages their participation. Also, instructors should set up the expectations of the students’ participation and communication. Unlike the traditional classroom, the instructors are required to follow up and remind the students frequently of all the expected work they have to turn on or work on [7].

Instructors who are teaching MOOCs should be aware of the self-efficacy factor that may impact the students’ learning and participation. Many of the students who registered in MOOCs classes are from around the world. The massive number of students requires MOOC instructors to be aware of the different instructional pedagogies that the students are used to. Students who are from developing countries or the Middle East tend to take a passive role in the classroom as they may be used to teaching pedagogies that are driven by the behaviorist learning theories. The behaviorist teaching approach focuses on individual learning and views learning as a measurable behavior. This teaching approach is different from what the students may be exposed to in the MOOC experience [8].

Since MOOCs are open to students from a variety of educational environments, there could be presence of challenges related to the impact of sociocultural factors, especially if the course follows a pedagogical style different from what the students are exposed to [9]. According to Fischer [10], “A fundamental challenge for cultures of participation is to conceptualize, create, and evolve socio-technical environments that not only technically enable and support users’ participation but also successfully encourage it. Participation is often determined by an individual’s assessment of value/effort. The effort can be reduced by providing the right kind of tools with meta-design, and the value can be increased by making all voices heard by supporting social creativity.”

3. The status of MOOCs in the Middle East and Asia

Since 2012, MOOCs courses have begun to attract a massive number of students around the world. In 2013 alone, students from English-speaking countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom comprised the majority of enrollees on Coursera, one of the first online learning platforms to emerge on the market. More astonishingly, in the same year, MITx MOOC was able to deliver courses to students from 194 countries [11]. From there, the spread of MOOCs never stopped; increasingly, more students from other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia, and the Middle East found an alternative learning opportunity by attending online courses [12], which is a testament to the utility of MOOCs in simultaneously delivering content knowledge to students regardless of their geographical location, unlike traditional education, which could only successfully deliver instruction through a controlled classroom size.

The following year witnessed a significant rise in the variety of subjects from different institutions. Shah reports that the number of MOOCs providers doubled to 400 universities [13]. The increasing interest among not only Western students but also international students shows that what these institutions offer in their MOOCs are worthwhile incentives. And students have various motives to engage with these online courses, depending on multifaceted cultural and educational factors. However, unlike the North American and European contexts that have enjoyed relative success with MOOCs, the success of MOOCs in non-English-speaking contexts has been propelled away by numerous impediments such as the lack of digital literacy, poor IT infrastructure, pedagogical setbacks, as well as language and cultural barriers.

Ideally, students who are partaking in MOOCs need to adjust the skillsets they have acquired from their traditional education. One thing to bear in mind about MOOCs is their democratized nature, which is the backdrop ideology behind the initiative. Democratization of knowledge involves making it equally accessible for everyone while blurring the line between the student and the instructor [14]. While the intended vision of democratization was to equalize the role of instructor and student, this kind of virtual environment in fact limits the instructor’s traditional role. As of consequence, the responsibility of learning is greatly shouldered by the student due to existing in an open-ended network space.

This necessitates that the students gain the ability to socialize differently from the usual in-person setting and be aware of certain behaviors and newly emergent social etiquettes. As for readjusting their academic skills, information literacy, that is, being able to identify, locate, aggregate, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge to address or solve problems is a prerequisite to navigating through the content in MOOCs [15]. Moreover, being familiar with the relevant discourse, from writing relatable blogs to posting comments, allows the student to engage with the discourse community. Most important academic skill is arguably self-evaluation. Since teacher-to-student evaluation might be modestly little, given the limitless size of MOOCs courses, being aware of one’s learning trajectory amid the diversity of discourse can either break or make the student’s experience [16]. All these skills can be categorically placed under a singular concept, “student autonomy.”

Recently, student autonomy has been investigated in different fronts of education such as STEAM, foreign language teaching (FLT), and early childhood learning. In the STEAM field, integrating autonomy support in teaching mathematics was found to be associated with developing twenty-first-century skills such as critical thinking and complex problem-solving [17]. In FLT, Irgatoglu et al. implemented Oxford’s Language Learning Strategy (LLS) to promote the autonomy of Turkish learners of English as a second language and observed that the use of LLS has helped reinforce their autonomous learning [18]. In a similar finding regarding early childhood education, Hunter-Dongier demonstrated the effectiveness of autonomy when integrated into the design of the subject content taught to children [19].

Although those skills are frequently emphasized in the literature, their emphasis falls flat in the classroom whose context is acculturated by a variety of rote-learning backgrounds. As a result, not all students, particularly outside the English-speaking educational context, are expected to come equipped with these baseline competencies. The philosophical and cultural backdrop of Asian education, for instance, has for so long rested on perceiving the instructor as the fount of knowledge from whom knowledge is transmitted to students [20]. One can anticipate resistance from students to the teaching method that contradicts this cultural perception. Recent reports articulate the same challenge in changing the status quo [21, 22, 23]. In fact, the teacher-centered tendency was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic [24].

Similar discernible issues with regard to student autonomy can also be observed in the Middle Eastern context. The way these issues manifest, however, is partly due to the underdeveloped technology of the time. Unlike the educational context like China, which has somewhat been more familiar and flexible with online learning, the potentiality of technology in the Middle East surfaced in the 1990s and it was bare-bone for a long period of time. Its technological feats have just recently reached an optimal level of maturation. Still, for many years to come, incorporating technology to establish online learning was excluded in public schools and higher education until the COVID-19 pandemic [25]. Their inclusion was merely due to the predicament of the time.

Another equally disruptive factor is the institutional and cultural resistance to the concept of online learning. For example, Saudi universities introduced distance-learning bachelor programs and, in the end, issued certificates that the same institution refused to recognize. Saudi universities opposed giving recognition to degrees earned by distance learning while the Ministry of Education prevented holders of distance-learning degrees from any employment opportunities in the educational sector. This caused a coalition of students to respond with a series of lawsuits against their institutions. One lawsuit that came to the public limelight was a student with a distance-learning master’s degree applying for a Ph.D. program at one of the top universities in the country. After being disqualified for having a distance-learning degree, the student filed a suit against the university. In response, the Board of Grievances annulled the decision of the university on the basis of giving equal opportunity to distance-learning and full-time degree holders.

By and large, the impact of this structural resistance to online education seeped into the culture. The universities ensured that online learning was devalued and remained discredited as a way of acquiring knowledge and skills in the eyes of the public and private sectors. However, when the transition from face-to-face learning to online was made amid the pandemic, the educational system in the Arabian Gulf, especially, realized its potential. That said, the transition to online learning was rushed, thus, giving birth to new teaching and learning difficulties pertaining to the absence of student autonomy and independent learning among Arab students.

These difficulties can also be noticeably translated into the participation of Arab students in MOOCs courses. Maksoud mentions three underlying factors that intervene with the participation of Arab students [26]. First, there is a significantly high dropout rate of Arab students attending MOOCs. It must be pointed out that although this problem is prevalent in nearly all virtual learning contexts, the problem is compounded in the Arabic-speaking learning context. This could be explained by the language barrier, where the majority of the courses are sponsored by prestigious institutions that use English as a medium of instruction (EMI).

Second, since most participants come from North America and Europe, there crops up a cultural alienation inside the virtual platform. Consider the cultural relevance of instruction and learning activities on MOOCs platforms mirrored for a Western cohort as opposed to a cohort attending from North Africa. Not only is there a polar opposite of cultures but also of learning experience between the two. In other words, only one of the student populations would more likely relate to the cultural cues of the MOOC than the other. The results from probing student populations in 10 MOOC platforms by Rizvi et al. point to the inhibition of a singular context, mostly Anglo-Saxon, on the progress of students from non-Western cultures such as the Middle East and South Asia [27].

Third, Arab students, Maksoud reports, lack computer literacy, which precludes their effective involvement and continuation in MOOCs. This is in conjunction with Ja’ashan’s findings who surveyed Saudi students at the University of Bisha. He enumerated five technology-related difficulties: (1) lack of technology for home access; (2) lack of technical support; (3) lack of training provided by the institution; (4) complicated software; and (5) inaccessible materials [28]. In a more recent investigation, Alanazi and Walker-Gleaves interviewed 45 Saudi students from Majmaah University about their attitude toward integrating MOOCs in their flipped classrooms, which is a novel combination of pedagogy for this cohort. According to the researchers, the instructional approach conflicted with their past learning experience from which emerged frustration and academic concerns. Only after a period of time did they become accustomed to navigating their hybrid classroom after which they recognized its advantages, from being time-saving to being goal-oriented [29].

Despite the advantages sowed by online education during the pandemic, until now, nearly all Arabic-speaking universities in the Middle East do not incentivize students who have enrolled at MOOCs courses with credits for the college specialization. MOOCs never began from those institutions. They have largely neglected the apparent upsides of MOOCs in providing accessible and lifelong education amid the inexorable changes in technology in modern life. Considering the average Internet user, in 2018, Egypt had the highest penetration of Internet users in North Africa at 43%. In 2019, it is estimated that the penetration rate of mobile internet users in Saudi Arabia reached 91%, whereas in the United Arab Emirates, 96%, population-wise [30]. This means that in that year, Saudi Arabia had 31.19 million users out of 34.27 million.

Rather than university-funded support, early initiatives to establish MOOCs in the Arab world started from individuals. The earliest inception of MOOCs, Sallam recounts, was heavily reliant on YouTube channels as of 2011. Individual university professors and schoolteachers would upload their lectures on their personal channels to make them available to the public. With time, these channels grew into a structured online platform. The first online learning platforms were Aldarayn Academic and Tahrir Academy, founded in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Aldarayn offers language learning courses, Quran recitation, accounting, as well as adult literacy. Tahrir Academy was more specialized, on the other hand. It had physics, astronomy, and Arabic grammar. Apparently, the former lacks funding but barely survives as it is based on volunteerism while the latter stopped adding content due to financial struggles as of 2015 [31].

Perhaps, among the most successful MOOCs are the Saudi-based Rwaq and Doroob, thanks to the multi-company sponsorship. Having the infrastructural and financial support played a pivotal role in its continuity as a MOOCs platform, which Aldarayn and Tahrir academies were lacking in their initial charter. Rwaq was first charted by Fuad Al Farhan and Sami Al Hussain in 2014 in response to the prevalence of MOOCs in the United States. The Saudi-run MOOCs cover a broad range of fields such as computer science, business administration, and social science. Within a short period, many different institutions, from academies to universities, partnered with Rwaq to make their courses accessible to a wider audience.

A similar approach was followed by Doroob. Unlike its predecessor, Doroob was launched by the Human Resources Development Fund that targeted professional development areas such as English language proficiency, computer literacy, and communication skills, as well as clerical training such as accounting, marketing, and secretary. Both MOOCs platforms pride themselves on their flexible access, but their focus seems to differ. Rwaq happens to be more community-centered, whereas Doroob is more outcomes-driven and focuses on ensuring accredited certification for the professional audience that aims to expand their skill set. For a complete list of MOOCs in the Arab world, see [32].

Arab students are motivated significantly differently with regard to joining prominent MOOCs platforms like Coursera or regional ones like Doroob. That said, understanding the reasons behind their participation can be ladened by overbearing theoretical models. Studies probe the concept of motivation differently from one another. Some studies view motivation as an intrinsic-extrinsic dichotomy; others view it from a theoretical model such as the self-determination theory and self-regulated learning. Nevertheless, the findings can reveal the reasons that spur Arab students toward MOOCs courses.

Davis et al. listed 16 motivators for enrolling in a MOOCs course, for instance, “they are free,” “curiosity,” “career change,” and so on. They distributed these motivators in a questionnaire to 194 Arab students alongside 52 English-speaking and 40 Spanish-speaking students. Not surprisingly, Arab students were motivated by professional goals such as improving their CVs by learning from reputable, world-leading universities [33]. Being motivated by career-oriented rewards speaks volumes to the need for employment in a constantly changing economy within the Arab world. Furthermore, this finding is mirrored back in other similar studies that observed the same professional-oriented mindset [34, 35, 36, 37].

On the same note, Asian students from Japan and China, who were interviewed, factored their motivation as a result of seeking future employment [38, 39]. The only difference is that, unlike Chinese students who mostly regarded MOOCs as a way to bolster their resumes, Japanese students expressed more inquisitiveness toward MOOCs for the sake of experiencing a new method of learning and having an international outreach with culturally diverse students.

Though motivation provides a somewhat reasonable explanation for why Arab and Asian students seek MOOCs platforms, we find it inadequate as an explanation when it comes to the absence of autonomy among such cohorts. This obstructive factor, either birthed structurally or culturally, presents a monumental challenge for both the Middle Eastern and Asian contexts to assimilate with MOOCs in commensurate effect as their Western counterpart. Besides that, students reported many frustrations with MOOCs regarding the overall course design, course content, and most importantly, the pedagogical approach or the lack thereof [40].

The MOOCs platforms available in the regional context and language in the Middle East and Asia may have availed culture-friendly content and virtual environment. Having done so may have also alleviated some of the struggles, which students typically face in West-dominated MOOCs. Regardless, adulterating the cultural content and virtual environment failed to contain two persistent issues: first, students still prefer MOOCs delivered by reputable Western platforms to the ones provided locally. It is no secret that a market-driven approach is a global phenomenon at universities, specifically at English-speaking universities. Even prior to the proliferation of online education and MOOCs, international students from all over the world have always placed a higher premium on Western education than their local universities [41]. Institutions in the West have a stronger foothold in their technological aptitude, pedagogical experience, and extensive subject knowledge, which makes them perceived as authority in deciding what constitutes knowledge [42]. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the same currency is given to the MOOCs provided by the same institutions.

Second, MOOCs in Asia and the Middle East are in their infancy. The technological and pedagogical shortcomings on part of the instructors persist even with the infrastructural support given to the platforms. These shortcomings are part of the educational climate that is described as traditional in which memorization permeates the classroom practice and the curriculum design. It is seemingly not enough to avail advanced technology to a cohort of instructors who are considered knowledge providers yet lack the appropriate teaching approach. Instructors with one-fits-all teacher-centered approaches (e.g., rote-learning, lecturing) will more likely struggle to manage MOOCs that rely on teacher-student collaboration and communication. Of course, training teachers to adopt learner-centered approaches as general mindset can raise their awareness of their pedagogical practice on a MOOCs platform, as Menon and Banerjee demonstrate in their evaluation of a teacher training course conducted in a MOOC setting [43].

Before the peak of online learning, the foreseeable shift from the traditional classroom to the virtual one presented an uncomfortable change in perspective. At that time, instructors had held a generally negative attitude [44, 45]. However, due to the increasing demand for instructors to gain competence in online teaching, instructors underwent a pendulum shift in their general attitude, becoming more receptive toward the importance of this new format [46, 47, 48, 49]. And this was emphasized during the upheaval of COVID-19 as an intervention to ameliorate the twofold barriers, intrinsic and extrinsic, which obstructed students’ progress to a considerable degree [50].

Intrinsic barriers perceived by online teachers can boil down to the instructivism versus constructivism debate. Instructivist approaches posit that knowledge is seeded in the real world and it needs to be transmitted to the learners in a linear manner. This type of teaching philosophy is instantiated in the teacher-led learning. The latter, however, believes that knowledge is co-constructed from the learners’ subjective reality, their thought, and cognitive processes. This teaching philosophy is instantiated in the learner-centered approach [51]. Accordingly, instructivism has created students hugely dependent on their instructors. Constructivism, on the other hand, invited more behavioral change in participation, which maximizes the students’ learning curve. In the same vein, Cheng and Ding observed that Chinese teachers’ performance became significantly more efficient in the classroom after using collaborative learning strategies [52]. To increase student participation and attention lifespan in the learning environment of MOOCs, not only should the presentation be visually appealing but also highly animated and entertaining in order to captivate and prolong their attention [53].

By contrast, extrinsic barriers are things beyond the teacher’s control, mostly related to the time constraint, the adeptness of the technology in class, and family environment under which students are brought [54]. These barriers are also reported in MOOCs, in addition to the difficulty of bringing a gamifying spin into the course [55].

These intrinsic and extrinsic barriers may hugely affect teacher attitudes and beliefs about online learning and, specifically, the value that MOOCs bring to thousands of students. Albelbisi and Yusop recommend that teachers focus on three primary aspects, technical, pedagogical, and soft skills [53]. Teachers involved in online education and MOOCs should undergo continual training programs, which mainly focus on planning, designing, developing, and delivering MOOCs. Moreover, the training should promote learner-centered pedagogy.

This section has investigated the current status of MOOCs in the Middle Eastern and Asian contexts. We have argued that at their current state, MOOCs are still under development and are impeded by the technological, pedagogical, as well as cultural and institutional challenges. Though the challenges are overwhelming, the learning environment on MOOCs could improve drastically when the following conditions are met. Students should become autonomous and independent learners; by the same token, teachers should equip themselves with effective pedagogical approaches. In other words, to achieve this, active learning and learner-centered practices must be cultivated.

4. Cultivating active learning and learner-centered pedagogical practices

Adopting twenty-first-century learning skills in online courses has drawn researchers in the field of education. They have explored the application of the twenty-first-century skills to fill the gap between the school curriculum and children’s real-life experiences. Implementing active learning pedagogies could increase the opportunity for the students on MOOCs to gain and demonstrate the twenty-first-century skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking and evidence-based practice. Developing twenty-first-century skills as part of the students’ learning process could consist of three emphases. First emphasis focuses on developing the students’ skills in both formal and informal learning. Instructors must use the different learning pedagogies to allow the students to transfer the skills from the online platform to actual social context [56].

The second emphasis focuses on both individualized and collaborative learning approaches. Instructors have to consider giving the students the responsibilities of planning their learning goals, monitoring their learning progress, and evaluating their own learning outcomes by themselves or collectively with their peers. Allowing the students to work cooperatively and communicate with each others promote active learning that complements these twenty-first-century skills. Regardless, the lack of physical contact between the instructor and peers presents a challenge. Designing the MOOC on active learning-based activities should increase the students’ interactions and participation. There is an advantage of MOOCs instructors can capitalize on by promoting active learning since there are usually massive number of students from worldwide registering for these courses. These students are coming from different cultural and educational backgrounds, which may create a good opportunity for them to exchange thoughts, build new skills, and enhance the learning process [57].

The third emphasis focuses on the awareness of the students in their learning process to develop their skills. The MOOC could increase the student’s awareness of the learning process by designing a range of activities. During the learning process, MOOCs can provide evidence of improvement collected from the learners’ performance. Processing real-life information, reflecting on other students’ presentations, and analyzing real-life situations could be indications of applying twenty-first-century skills. The online environment provides the students with all these opportunities of monitoring their development. The learning goals usually consist of both knowledge and skills that instructors aim to measure as outcomes of the learning process. The learning outcomes need to be monitored throughout the learning journey. Usually, in a traditional classroom context, instructors may be overwhelmed with the number of the activities that they have to monitor and follow up on, which is a huge challenge.

Nevertheless, MOOCs platforms provide technology tools and features, which allow the activity reports and results generated automatically from the system. Such automated functions provide automated comments, generating grade reports and learning process data would make it convenient for the instructors to apply active learning. The MOOC platform could help the instructors to increase the number of the learning activities and provide timely feedback. This will make it easier for students to apply the skills and not be limited to summative, which is at a single learning time as in the traditional classrooms [58].

Promoting twenty-first-century skills among students in online learning requires implementing active learning pedagogies that fit the design of MOOCs platforms. The instructor may assess the application of interactive learning process among the students and, therefore, develop their skills [59]. Applying active learning requires the instructor to provide and develop adequate and relevant issues, in order to allow students to deal with scenarios related to the real world. Online instructors, therefore, need to change their pedagogical practice and lead students in multiple approaches: engaging students in, constructive and interactive learning processes to develop their application and reflection of twenty-first-century skills, and increasing their awareness of the learning processes [60].

All the students’ online interactions and activities fit under the scope of learning community, which was explained earlier by activity theory. Maximizing the students’ experience and developing their skills is impacted by different factors relevant to the student’s engagement and awareness of the learning process. One of the instructor’s roles in supporting the student in such an online context is to allow the students to develop their plan for their learning outcomes. According to the activity theory, students must use mediator tools and interact with their community to reach their outcomes. Instructors must be aware of how to implement these approaches in their online activities.

Until now, MOOCs have been designed around multiple technological features that are regarded as advantageous over the traditional classroom. Supposedly, the more advanced the technology is, the higher the engagement becomes among students. Fostering a learning community that promotes variable social integration and engagement (i.e., student-to-student, instructor-to-student) seems encumbering. The community integration of social media like Facebook and Twitter was replicated to facilitate student groups on MOOCs at the expense of dismantling the instructor’s authority. Similar to how people engage with one another on social media apps, students befriend others by selecting them, thus, creating a community-run learning environment [61]. The previous section discussed the possible emerging problems from removing the instructor, as they are perceived as a point of reference for their students in the non-Anglo-Saxon learning contexts. This adds further skepticism regarding the conclusiveness of dressing MOOCs with technological features to create a classroom community and a classroom culture run solely by students. It appears that until the present day of writing this chapter, the traditional classroom still reigns over in terms of social integration of students.

Having said that, MOOCs have transformative opportunities that could somewhat mirror their traditional counterpart. Since MOOCs facilitate an astronomical number of students compared to the face-to-face classroom, it is vital to implement instructional strategies that foster different types of student engagement, namely, cognitive, metacognitive, emotional, and social in proportion to the size of the MOOC class. Hmelo-Silver et al. suggest the implementation of project-based learning (PBL) to actualize the various aspects of student engagement [62]. Dissimilar to the social media integration, the instructor has a performative role as a facilitator. Students, on the other hand, have directed their learning and evaluated their performance accordingly. The facilitator’s role is to ensure that students are active during the lifespan of the given task, and by and large, the course. This is done so by eliciting the students’ accumulated knowledge and inviting them to consider facts and information, which is yet to unravel for them. The facilitator acts as a director wherein they stimulate a discussion among the students. This pushes them to expand upon what they already know and reassess their current acquired knowledge.

Without the facilitator’s role in mediating the discussion for the students, there is a chance that they are left unprobed, unchallenged, and hugely unattended for. Unlike the view that opts for a completely student-run MOOC platform, this approach might prove inadequate, as there is no expertise to drive the discussion forward and invoke critical and analytical thinking about the subject matter. This teacher-to-student interaction offers mediation to the open-endedness of the content. This is in line with the view propounded by Zhao who argues that open-source content poses a developmental challenge to sustainability [63].

Another type of interaction is student-to-student, which is central to both face-to-face and online learning. If the importance of the former type of interaction lies in keeping the students active, the importance of this one lies in its construction of meaning. In other words, students develop a sense of belonging from the groups they form. The main means of communication for student interaction is through discussion forums, which can encompass numerous engagement opportunities. Yet, researchers have found that text-based discussion can be somewhat lacking, which is why, recently, MOOC software has come out to complement and enhance student-led discussions such as Rain Classroom and DanMOOC. For instance, DanMOOC organizes the comment section in the form of a timeline, allowing the students to create a thread of annotations on video playbacks. Students’ annotations and comments enrich both the discussion and content, as it facilitates “extra explanations, personal reflections, and extended discussions [64].” Certainly, integrating such discussion-boosting applications has been demonstrably beneficial inside and outside the MOOCs class [65].

Certainly, mediating the type of interaction on the MOOCs bears a number of benefits, specifically, in light of the twenty-first-century competencies that should be considered in the course design and development. The most common competencies identified in the literature are cognitive skills (e.g., analytical thinking and problem-solving), interpersonal skills (e.g., presentation skills), and intrapersonal skills (e.g., adaptability, self-management, and self-development). Literature on equipping students with these skills is documented heavily in the offline setting. On MOOCs, however, research is still in its infancy, particularly, when one bears in mind that the environment of discussion in one MOOC class is hugely different from that of another. Thus, differential outcomes are expected to arise and, in the process, hinder the acquisition of these competencies. In fact, even though a discussion-based approach is considered a part of active learning, its effectiveness relies primarily on student performance and preparedness [66].

For example, if students are required to do some key readings prior to the class, they will not reap the benefits of the discussion and it will have a scant impact on their learning. Similarly, low-performing students may struggle to prepare for the class, unlike their high-performing peers who find navigating the virtual platform relatively easy. Of course, the reasons for these difficulties may vary depending on the kind of barrier (discussed in the previous section). One way to alleviate this is to break down the massive size of online students into small cohorts with variable performance and skills. This way, students who are falling behind could seek peer support and advance in their learning at their own pace.

From the technological perspective, the design of the discussion layout gives vibrancy to the student user, from the colors, graphics, and the web layout. This is known as technology-enhanced learning (TEL). Even though the visuals are an indication of the platform’s technological sophistication, there exist supporting criteria in complementing the discussion-based approach. Yousef et al. identified four technical criteria: user interface, video content, learning and social tools, and learning analytics [67].

This is irrelevant to the quality of discussion content, which is under the pedagogical criteria. In examining the perception of instructors and students, the researchers found that in the technical criteria, the user interface and video quality are fundamental for a self-sufficient MOOC course. The user interface was shown to impact the efficiency and student satisfaction in MOOC environment while the impact of the video quality was exemplified by its accessibility, appropriate length, and accuracy.

5. Conclusion

Adopting active learning pedagogies in MOOC context would enhance the student’s participation and engagement and, therefore, maximize their learning experience. MOOCs could be very beneficial for students to develop their skills if they received the appropriate support and awareness of their responsibilities. Instructors can enhance the students’ experience and help them to develop twenty-first-century skills if they implement the above-mentioned active learning approach. Considering the cultural and technological factors are essential components that influence the MOOC experience.