MOOC quality assurance by a university-course produce

Massive open online courses (MOOC) aimed at affording education to the wide audience and their integration into traditional learning process emphasized the need for their quality management. International QA systems or those developed by MOOC providers themselves are used globally. As for Russia, recent initiatives are being implemented in the framework of the priority project “Modern digital educational environment in the Russian Federation”. Tomsk State University has its own system of quality assurance for online courses. It goes along with the key stages of course production: university competition of MOOC instructional design (QA is realized by the committee members), online course design (qualified instructional designer and subject experts), videoproduction (video director, camera man, cutter, editor and equipment), publishing the course on the platform and supporting the learning process (platform coordinator, instructor or his/her assistants (or course mentors)), and finally learning analytics (analyst, instructional designer and instructor). Once completing the course TSU MOOC learners are able to assess quality from their point of view filling in the questionnaire. Though online courses differ, their quality criteria are generally the same, such as the number of enrollments, course completers and certificates and others. Considering even two major types of courses - popular science and the specialized MOOCs- one can spot the differences connected with the quality assessment. To prove that authors have divided the learners answers to the final questionnaire into two groups (popular science and the specialized courses), calculated their average and compared them. It appeared to be that more learners of the first group believe that video lectures are the most useful element in a MOOC then their colleagues from the second group (93,10% versus 81,62%). At the same time learners from the second group more often perceive assignments as the most useful element, then those from the first group (44% versus 37%). More popular science MOOC learners highly evaluate the level of expertise of the course instructors (91%, compared to 86% of specialized MOOC learners), and the depth of the course content (80% compared to 76% of specialized MOOC learners). Authors suggest their motives for that. Basing on the study results the conclusion has been made that different types of MOOCs have their own crucial elements and aspects, which should be taking into consideration in the MOOC quality assessment systems.

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