MOOC strategies of higher education institutions in Lithuania: status report based on a mapping survey conducted in November 2016 - February 2017
ENMassive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been a driving power for higher education for more than a decade. During this time, massive open online courses became one of the alternative models to provide education. In the meaning of openness, massive open online courses has flipped up the understanding of the delivery of quality education. The worldwide trends of MOOCs show that MOOCs evolved quickly. In the past few years, MOOCs has changed its’ concept (MOOCs are no longer massive) (Shah, 2016), expended functionality and involved more difficult tools for learning and students’ management (Learning Analytics). Although, the providers of MOOCs face more problems than ever before: cohorting of students, Interactives, Student Engagement and persistence, progressive personal Profile, Personalization, User Experience, Credentialing (Forbes, 2017) and many more. However, these challenges does not prevent new players from entering to MOOCs market. Lithuania has joint the worldwide MOOCs initiatives in 2013 by providing the first MOOC titled “Project Management”. One year later, in 2014, the MOOC titled “Information Technologies” was offered to learners. It was the first MOOC provided in the national language. These two MOOCs have boosted an attention to MOOCs in Lithuania, more higher education institutions were interested in providing MOOCs by themselves. However, Kaunas University of Technology still keeps the leading position in this area and initiates most of MOOCs in the market.The main issue why many higher education institutions in Lithuania are interested but do not take any actions towards creation of massive open online courses is that they have almost no experience in providing massive open online courses. This issue creates additional challenges to institutions such as a lack of technological and pedagogical support, teachers’ readiness to provide manage MOOCs, also, the traditional attitude to learning. It also requires some deep preparation: knowledge how to create, provide and manage learners and learning process, how to set up technological resources for big number of external students, how to solve unexpected problems and how to keep up learners’ motivation during the learning process. However, those challenges pay back the experience gained by providing one MOOC at least. Analysing MOOCs provided by Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuanian MOOCs, as well as international, enrich the learning content by including many open online resources that helps to make a MOOC more attractive, more reachable and, most importantly, free for learners.
