This book aims at discussing the development of MOOCs in China in relation to MOOCs in other countries or areas. Based on the history of MOOCs, we summarize and compare the development of MOOCs in China and other countries with empirical evidence from a comprehensive investigation about MOOCs in Asian, United States, and Europe. Then we discuss about the importance of MOOCs in China and its role in the reform of higher education system, and the model of teaching and learning in China. After all, we provide suggestions about how to improve MOOCs at the national, institutional, and individual level.
In this book, we analyse and present the current construction and development of MOOCs in China from four dimensions including platforms, courses, learners, colleges and universities based on huge empirical evidence from a comprehensive investigation of 14 platforms, 42 universities, 1388 MOOCs, and 22895 learners. Our investigation mainly focused on seven topics: platform construction and operation, learner groups, curriculum organization form, teaching interaction, learning evaluation model, learning support service, and courses certification and academic score system.
Based on the investigation, we found there is an emerging trend of collaboration among government, universities and enterprise in the development of MOOCs in China, which provides great opportunities to build an innovative educational service system for all kinds of learners. We also discuss our findings in relation to the corresponding development of MOOCs in United States, Europe and other regions and then focus on the unique challenges that China faces, such as the lack of deep learning in MOOCs, the low information literacy and self-regulated learning abilities of MOOC learners, the lack of individualized support for MOOC learners, and so on. At last, this book summarizes the overall development of MOOCs in China and other countries and then put forward the future trends and suggestions in this field.
Author Biography:
Qinhua Zheng is director of Research Center of Distance Education, BNU. He earned his PhD from Beijing Normal University, China. He has initiated and led many successful projects. Areas of his research interests include the Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Distance Education, Quality Assurance of e-Learning, Massive Online Open Courses, Learning Analytics, Big Data in Education. He has published over 60 scientific papers and 5 books on these topics. These years, his researches mainly focused on how to build the model to explain the online learners’ competency during their web-based learning, and how to use data to show and assess teaching and learning. He has developed the software “Wisdom Line” to support the online learning institutes in China based on the researches.
Prof. Chen Li, Vice president of Beijing Normal University (BNU). Since 2005, she has worked as a professor in Research Center of Distance Education. Meanwhile, she also worked as a visiting scholar at Open University in UK and Open University in HK. Professor Chen’s research mainly focuses on Distance Education & Lifelong Learning. she has been undertaking more than 10 large-scale projects. She is currently leading the projects “Quality Assurance Standard on Distance Education for China” and “Survey on Lifelong Learning Literacy for Adult in Beijing”. She has published 10 books and more than 100 academic papers.
Prof. Dr. Daniel Burgos works as Vice-rector for Knowledge Transfer & Technology, UNESCO Chair on eLearning and ICDE Chair in OER at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja. He is also Director of the Research Institute for Innovation & Technology in Education. He contributes to research and implementation projects about social entrepreneurship (Social Seducement), regional Open Education (OpenMed), clustered Open Education (Open Educators Factory), funded by the European Commission and Worldwide. His interests mainly focus on Educational Technology and Innovation: Adaptive/Personalised and Informal eLearning, Open Education, Learning Analytics, Social Networks, eGames, and eLearning Specifications. He has published over 100 scientific papers and 15 books on these topics. He has been the jury chair of the 2016 UNESCO Prize for the Use of ICTs in Education. He holds degrees in Communication (PhD), Computer Science (Dr. Ing), Education (PhD), Anthropology (PhD) and Business Administration (DBA).
