The Potential Of Spreading Massive Open Online Courses In Kazakhstan Education

The Potential Of Spreading Massive Open Online Courses In Kazakhstan Education

Zhanabayev Daniyar

Although online learning has long ceased to be something innovative in Western universities, it is only gaining popularity in Kazakhstan. The advantages of online learning open new opportunities for the national education system and give rise to thinking about new peaks in mass education; therefore, free online education obviously awaits a prosperous future.

History knows the excellent universities of the United States of America that began to digitize the lectures of leading professors and spread them into free Internet access since the beginning of the 2000s. At the initial stages, users only dealt with fragments of training courses, tests, and various simulators. Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the leader and innovator in this field and already laid out 3,500 of its courses in free access to the worldwide network [1].

It was not enough merely to provide video lectures to access via the Internet, even if they are unique because it did not guarantee that people would learn from these lectures and study them independently, guided only by their motivation and discipline. In this regard, a need to organize the process of online training involved the next stage – MOOC or massive open online courses [2].

Recently some British universities started cooperation with FutureLearn, the developer of the paid distant learning system "Open University" [3]. The purpose of collaboration is just the creation of the method of the MOOC, following the example of American colleagues that already began to use the MOOC courses to test students. Moreover, plenty of universities offer their graduates to pass full-time examinations and receive a certificate for a fee. Perhaps, in ten years, it will not matter where and how one gets knowledge.

Such MOOCs as Coursera [4] provide information on the university issued the course, the professor trained the participants, the syllabus with smart goals, and the certificate at the end of the training. The teachers of Coursera partner institutes create the courses, to complete which one should register on the site and sign up for it in advance or the process. The finished course remains on the site in the form of an archive containing all materials that can be used without tasks’ evaluation and certification. The course is usually built on a weekly basis, where each week has new video lections and quizzes corresponding to them, which must be completed by the specified date.

Such settings depend on the teacher. In particular, it is usually possible to perform each test many times, while the maximum result is achieved as the final (automatic check), which is counted in the certification process. Tasks are issued each time randomly, so guessing the correct answer by the method of elimination is almost impossible. In addition to weekly quizzes to check and consolidate knowledge, teachers can from arrange practical assignments or mini-projects, to which one can apply the acquired expertise. Such practice involves peer assessment when each participant must check a certain number (4-5) of other participants’ assignments, evaluate them according to the rubrics provided and write a review after the personal task has been submitted. It is a mandatory part; otherwise, the final score decreases.

Teachers can add links to additional literature and other sources on the topic as supporting materials and various virtual tools for performing tasks in their courses [5]. Each course resembles some real class for a forum where participants can get acquainted, ask any questions and receive answers to them both from peers and from teachers. Each registered user can create an account for this or that course with a link to his/her home page, after which the participants of this course can gather there and interact in small training groups at different "tables," each of which is equipped with a chat and an interactive "board" to write, draw, or share files [5].

However, MOOC should not be mixed up with distance courses for their close relationship with students enrolling in the same class. Such a link provided by MOOC is what the average distance education lacks – the social nature of the process in the forms of general chat rooms, forums, and peer-evaluation, often found in MOOC.

Unlike traditional online courses, MOOC started as free platforms. At the moment, their gradual commercialization is taking place. In some cases, the income is earned from those graduates who want to receive original certificates by mail or take personal examinations at the passed course at the university and are ready to pay for it. On other platforms, those wishing to spend a symbolic fee for accessing the course and receive a simple electronic certificate. Others are still implementing the MOOC model without a commercial component but just as an experiment.

The online education market is just starting to be created. So, for the first year of its work, the Coursera project [4], which combines courses from thirty-three elite US educational institutes such as Princeton and Columbia University has recruited two million listeners. Three hundred and seventy thousand students enrolled in the nonprofit project of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology EDX [1]. Finally, a hundred and fifty-five thousand remote students enrolled only for one course "Introduction to the basics of artificial intelligence" provided by Udacity company [6-7].

The already mentioned project of massive open online courses Coursera [4] is the most in demand today because thirty-three of the most famous universities in the United States provides training on it for free. At the moment, Coursera pursues a policy of financial aid to students, provided that they accompany their request for funding with a motivation letter. Coursera positions itself as a portal for learning and creating educational networks. Students create their profiles, like on Facebook, upload photos, and group together. There is a built-in function for the planning of training, a calendar of meetings Courserians around the world (a list of 1,400 cities).

The Udacity project, in turn, focused on math and computer science [7]. The names of the courses are much more practical: "How to make a platform" or "How to create a web browser." The main idea of Udacity is the subsequent employment of the training, which makes sense, primarily if one focuses on developing countries, where practical skills may be more important than theoretical training. Such companies as Google and Microsoft cooperate with Udacity courses, but all teachers have required the professionalism in setting out the material.

Google also launched a project Class2Go [8] in collaboration with Stanford University. The main difference from competitors is that Class2Go is an open source platform aimed at working with portable devices - smartphones, iPads and so on where anyone can get involved in this project and develop it at their discretion.

Another already-menthioned leader of the new education segment – the nonprofit project of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology EDX – relies on elite education [1]. About 120 universities were considered as candidates for participation in the project, and only Berkeley University, University of Texas, and Georgetown University were admitted to the club so far. EDX features a large number of online tools for testing students; the emphasis is on the system and relevant training in such disciplines as computer science and electronics [1]. Thus, mainly the US and the UK develop MOOC, although a tendency for increasing rates in European and Asian countries is continuously growing, although the proportion of courses, in comparison with the English-speaking, is still tiny. Happily, recently, about thirty MOOCs appeared in Russia: Higher School of Economics and Moscow Physicotechnical Institute exhibited at Coursera [9].

The popularity of online learning is growing. A large number of people who want to receive excellent training and knowledge for a symbolic fee indicates the following [10]:

1) A lot of people are dissatisfied with the quality of education on the ground, do not trust local educational systems that are far behind modern teaching methods, have an authoritarian character, and do not introduce advanced teaching technologies into the educational process.

2) Teachers are not ready or are not sufficiently motivated to prepare high-quality educational content.

3) The national education systems of many countries do not respond to modern challenges from developed countries, do not analyze the current state of higher education, and do not have a long-term development policy for their national education system.

Undoubtedly, it is necessary to consolidate the efforts of Kazakhstani teachers in preparing the MOOC to create new educational resources in Kazakhstan and conduct their certification at the world level.

References

1 “Class Central.”Massachusetts Institute of Technology • Free Online Courses and MOOCs, www.class-central.com/university/mit.

2 “MOOC List.” MOOC List, www.mooc-list.com/.

3 “Flexible Education of the Highest Standard.” The Open University, www.open.ac.uk/.

4 “Online Courses & Credentials by Top Educators. Join for Free.” Coursera, www.coursera.org/.

5 Ascd. “Chapter 1. Student Motivation, Engagement, and Achievement.” Student Motivation, Engagement, and Achievement, www.ascd.org/publications/books/107034/chapters/Student-Motivation,-Engagement,-and-Achievement.aspx.

6 Baraka, Miri, et al. “Motivation to Learn in Massive Open Online Courses: Examining Aspects of Language and Social Engagement.” Computers & Education, Pergamon, 2015, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131515300828.

7 “Free Online Classes & Nanodegrees.” Udacity, www.udacity.com/.

7 “| Stanford Lagunita.” Stanford Lagunita, class.stanford.edu/.

8 “Not Coming Soon!” Coming Soon - Class2Go.Com, www.class2go.com/.

9 “Celebrating 4 Years with Coursera: HSE's New Online Courses.” - National Research University Higher School of Economics, www.hse.ru/en/news/edu/216074903.html.

10 Cadwalladr, Carole. “Do Online Courses Spell the End for the Traditional University?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2012, www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/11/online-free-learning-end-of-university.