2. Intensify learning support by making use of the mentorship model
The need to design and develop course resources targeted at lifelong learners is a consensus among all platforms. Neither Coursera nor edX has set up specialised courses for professional certificates. Udacity developed a nanodegree programme by building on the “on-demand” platform strategy. In order to further improve learning quality and improve the learning experience, Udacity also released an updated model for Personal Mentorship and Career Coaching in 2019. After completing registration in the programme, each nano learner will be assigned an exclusive tutor who offers support in the form of learning advice, trade instruction, and career planning. In addition, the nanodegrees programme will also give feedback and assistance on CVs, personal statements, and interviews. Udacity has indicated that no other online learning platform is able to provide such comprehensive 1-1 mentorship services across the whole process, and that the platform also hopes that the graduation rate of the nano-degree programme will increased from 34% to 60% with the help of the updated mentorship model (Thrun, 2019). The mentorship model itself can be regarded as a value-added service, which is part of Udacity’s attempt to create profit and attract more paying students.
3. Planning a certification system for lifelong learning results
Another major expression of how MOOCs continue to better serve lifelong learning lies in the accreditation and accumulation of lifelong learning results. In 2019, the European MOOC Union jointly made up of FutureLearn, Miriadax, FUN, and EduOpen officially released the MOOCs-based Common Microcredentials Framework (CMF). This aims to solve the problems learners and employees face in the non-standardised names and traits of learning achievements in different countries and regions within the European Union (EU). It promotes the standardisation of MOOC learning experiences and the extensive recognition of MOOC learning in society. The updated CMF is coupled with the existing European Qualifications Framework (EQF) and is included in the EQF to aid in learner qualification assessment (Europearn MOOC Consortium, 2019). Moreover, EQF is the EU’s most formal certification standard for adult learning, lifelong learning, the labour market, and trans-regional exchanges (Zhang & Fu, 2013). To put CMF to true effect, the European MOOC Union has underscored that certified learning experiences and results should meet the quality requirements of qualification levels corresponding to the EQF. The learning period should reach 100-150 class hours, and the skills that the learners have acquired, and their accumulative credits, should be clearly marked. As Europe’s largest MOOC platform, FutureLearn now offers seven courses and programmes that are up to CMF standard; the shortest learning period is 10 weeks and the longest 13 weeks. The organization model of CMF is somewhat similar to the credit model being popularised in China now. The official MOOC platform of the Republic of Korea, K-MOOC, also supports learners in getting credits from the credit bank through MOOC learning. At present, there are 16 courses, including culture, tourism, and business administration for learners to choose from, and each course can be transferred into two to three credits in the credit bank.
III. Blended teaching becomes a breakthrough for MOOCs’ in the field of higher education
In addition to serving lifelong learning, all MOOC platforms also explore opportunities and ways to integrate MOOCs into higher education. Both MOOC researchers and MOOC practitioners believe that MOOCs cannot completely replace universities, but that they will create opportunities, challenges, and innovation in the existing higher education field (Zhong & Lin, 2015; Wang, 2016). During this process, blended teaching based on MOOC resources is of great importance. On the one hand, the number of MOOCs is increasing year by year and the number of related disciplines constantly expanding, laying a powerful resource base for blended teaching in schools. On the other hand, the coordination of MOOC resources and face-to-face teaching and learning gives teachers the chance to make individualised adjustments in line with the training objectives and the student characteristics, make teaching more targeted, and improve the efficiency and quality of course teaching. This is the advantage of blended teaching in contrast to simple large-scale online teaching.
On the issue of how to look at and use MOOC resources to carry out blended teaching, Agarwal (2013), founder of edX and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), proposed that the value of MOOCs lies in offering systematic courses carefully designed by renowned teachers in prestigious universities in a free and open way. Teachers from any school are able to make use of these courses in the same way as using textbooks or teaching materials, and design other learning and assessment activities according to their own needs to realise the reform of course teaching. In 2013, a teacher at San Jose State University began blended teaching using the MOOCs offered by Agarwal. The blended model of “completion of MOOC learning before class, exercises completed by individuals and groups in class” he adopted has increased the pass rate from 59% to 91% (Ghadiri et al., 2013). Over the last few years, the practice and research of blended teaching using MOOC resources has risen year by year. Eradze et al. (2019) conducted a literature review of 48 items of MOOCs-based empirical research of blended teaching, and found that college teachers tend to view MOOCs as a kind of driving condition or motivation rather than an alternative to teaching, or as an additional resource when they carry out blended teaching with MOOCs. In light of this, the use of MOOC resources for a flipped classroom is the main choice for most teachers.
In October 2019, Coursera released a new campus-oriented B2B service: Coursera for Campus. Coursera for Campus means that blended teaching based on MOOC resources is no longer just for individual university teachers, it is now a platform for wider operation. The service covers the following: 1) Universities can open up more than 3,600 independent courses developed by 190 universities and institutions in the Coursera course catalogue to its students, staff members and fellows by collecting fees for them, and teachers and students can expand their knowledge and skills with these courses; 2) The online courses provided by Coursera can be used as supplementary materials for university courses or enable the credit certification of certain courses, further improving the flexibility of talent cultivation inside the university with online learning and removeing the time and space restrictions of traditional teaching; 3) Teachers can make use of Coursera’s rich online course resources and platform advantages to create online or blended learning experiences for students.
Coursera for Campus allows teachers to organise various learning resources in a modular way in order to achieve specific teaching objectives and supports seamless connection with the university’s own learning management system (LMS) to provide a smoother learning experience. Teachers can track their students’ knowledge and capacity development level through the learning instruments panel and Coursera’s learning analysis tools. In the future, Coursera for Campus will also allow teachers to develop their own learning resources and assessment activities and put the relevant contents online to create new courses. To some extent, Coursera for Campus can be regarded as an expansion of Coursera’s former Coursera for Partners. It enables all universities carrying out online or blended teaching based on MOOCs to lower their development costs and to get started quickly by relying on the resources of prestigious universities and renowned teachers. To date, Coursera for Campus products have been trialled in 20 universities, including Duke University and the University of Michigan in the US and Manipal University in India.