Proceedings of the 2nd Teaching & Education Conference, Florence

IDCOURSERIANS, A MOOCS LEARNING COMMUNITY IN INDONESIA

MANDA FIRMANSYAH

Abstract:

The notion of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has attracted thousands life-long learners worldwide to enrol. Following this, some face-to-face learning communities have emerged in societies either through MOOC providers or organically founded. Example of the latter is IDCourserian based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Since a little is known on how a MOOC being studied in such community setting, this study aims to investigate what is actually happening in the IDCourserians, using collaborative learning as the theoretical framework. Adopting an intrinsic qualitative case study, this research employed interview, observations, and document review to gather data from six IDCourserian members, community meetups, and its Facebook group. For analysis, this study utilised thematic analysis approach. The findings show that the methods the IDCourserians members learn MOOCs together evolved as the community progressed, ranging from face-to-face to online and synchronous to asynchronous. However, only several from seven identified learning methods can be regarded as collaborative learning. Furthermore, the findings also remark that such online learning platforms still need face-to-face interactions and disregard the notion that education can be fully delivered through online technologies. Moreover, how the learning methods are in tension between two types of MOOC (c-MOOCs and x-MOOCs) will be discussed further.

Keywords: MOOCs, learning community, collaborative learning, distance and blended education, lifelong learners

DOI: 10.20472/TEC.2015.002.003

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