What Can We Learn about Teaching from MOOCs?

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, once promised to disrupt and transform higher education. However, analysis of example courses, and experiences by learners, has demonstrated that while providing access to content- driven discipline knowledge at scale, many MOOCs are lacking in what we know as good pedagogical practice. However, is this necessarily the case? In addition, are there things that we can learn about learning and teaching from exploring and analysing the MOOC model and how learners engage? In this talk, I will explore some example case studies where we have explored the translation of established pedagogical practice into a MOOC environment, with the aim of generating discussion as to what might be possible. I will also share some of our recent findings influencing both online and face-to-face classrooms from analysing the wealth of student data that is potentially available within MOOC platforms.