Dissertations on MOOCs published in 2014

1. Congratulations to the following seven individuals who completed a doctoral degree in 2014.

2. It’s always interesting to explore literature outside of peer-reviewed journals to explore how early career colleagues are thinking about a topic.

3. The doctoral dissertations that follow were all published in 2014 and they focus on various aspects of MOOCs. Undoubtedly, some of the findings reported below will make it into the peer-reviewed literature. As far as I can tell, findings from Kassabian, Kellogg, and Moe have already been published.

3. I believe that it would have been more valuable if these were already published as a series of shorter articles instead of being published as volumes that then need additional effort to be revised/refined for submission to professional journals, a practice that is both frequent and encouraged. My dissertation in 2008 was a 3-paper series. There’s ways to do this, and really good reasons to do so. I’ve discussed this option with 3-4 doctoral students recently that are exploring the option, but institutions need policies and frameworks in place to support such efforts.

4. I digress. Below you can find the citation and abstracts for these seven dissertations. Enjoy!

Gerber, j. (2014). MooCs: Innovation, Disruption and Instructional Leadership in Higher Education. ProQuest, umi Dissertations Publishing.

In the beginning rush of attention surrounding MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), there was considerable speculation regarding the ideal use and potential impact of this new innovation on teaching, learning, and traditional higher educational structures. Yet universities and colleges were rushing to implement MOOCs despite neither data nor clear understanding regarding their potential disruptive force on the educational landscape. To examine the MOOC phenomenon more closely, I conducted qualitative research that examined MOOCs integration at higher education institutions identified to be at the forefront of the MOOC movement. Framed using Everett Rogers’ model of innovation diffusion (Rogers, 1962), MOOC early adopters were defined as faculty members from US institutions who offered MOOCs between April 2012 and December 2013. This study researched initial MOOC implementation efforts in order to better determine motivations, implications and future impact on higher education, which will provide greater context to this rapidly shifting innovation. My findings indicate that the primary institutional motivation to sponsor MOOCs was to raise and/or enhance their institutional brand. The findings also indicated that faculty that self-selected to participate in MOOCs at the early stage was open to experimentation as well as to the inherent risks associated with the trial of a new educational innovation. This study uncovered important implications on the main pedagogical mission of the university and its professors as a result of instructor and institutional involvement with MOOCs. More specifically, this study revealed that MOOCs have pushed pedagogical issues to the forefront, and faculty early adopters have shifted their classroom teaching in ways believed to improve the classroom experience and create more interactive learning opportunities for students as a result of MOOCs.

Kassabian, d. (2014). Massive Open Online Courses (mooCs) at elite, early-adopter universities: Goals, progress, and value proposition. ProQuest, umi Dissertations Publishing.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a hot topic in higher education and have undergone rapid growth. More than 800 MOOCs have been offered to the public from more than 200 of the most well known universities in the world, with millions of learners taking them. While many elite universities have developed MOOCs, their motivations have not been entirely clear. This qualitative case study research explores what three early adopter universities, Columbia University, Duke University, and Harvard University, hope to achieve by becoming involved and investing in MOOCs, how they are assessing progress toward goals, and what value proposition they seek as a return on their investment. The findings of this research suggest that the studied universities have several goals in common and a few that differ, and importantly, that several of their goals do not directly align with the public narrative around MOOCs in the press. In particular, while the goals of the studied universities do include expanded access to education, their goals may have even more to do with promoting teaching innovation and providing benefits for their residential education. None of the studied universities were focused on improvements to higher education completion challenges through pursuit of MOOC credit, or the use of MOOCs as a way to control higher education costs–both of which are major elements of the public dialogue on MOOCs. Other goals of the early adopters studied included providing more visibility for some of their educational programs and their faculty, and enabling more evidence-based education research. This study concludes that the value proposition for early adopter universities is the ability to simultaneously pursue the goal of improving on-campus teaching and learning while also promoting the university and its faculty and connecting through educational outreach with the public–all while showing leadership in an emerging higher education learning technology.