Evaluating Long-term MOOC Impact: A Case Study of TEL MOOC

Since the launch of the first massive open online course (MOOC) in 2008, numerous claims have been made about MOOCs’ power to ‘fix’ broken education systems, including those in the Global South. However, some (e.g. Altbach, 2014) argue that MOOCs are strengthening the dominant academic culture of the West, to the exclusion of alternative voices. Subsequently, there has been a growing call for the creation of more localised MOOCs in the Global South, in addition to demand for rigorous evaluation of MOOCs’ long term impact in order to ascertain whether individual courses are meeting their intended outcomes for learners and other stakeholders in diverse contexts. This paper outlines a new approach to investigating MOOCs’ long-term impact, developed in connection with a long-term impact evaluation of the ‘Introduction to Technology-Enabled Learning (TEL) MOOC’ (https://www.telmooc.org/) - a collaboration between Athabasca University, Canada, and the Commonwealth of Learning. A ‘theory of change’ approach has been applied as the framework for the TEL MOOC evaluation, allowing for investigation of complex mechanisms of change and causality. The evaluation findings themselves will be shared at PCF9 and will be the focus of a subsequent report