Assessment of the pedagogical quality of the MOOC

Resumen

MOOC have burst into the sphere of education in an accelerated way. Firstly, the main US universities, and later many others –among them, some Spanish ones— have been developing courses under this format through various platforms on the Internet. Since MOOC are still at an early stage of development, few studies have been published on their assessment so far. That is why the present study has carried out 129 pedagogical assessments on 52 MOOC offered by 10 platforms. Their pedagogical characteristics have been analyzed after the Cuestionario de evaluación de la calidad de cursos virtuales (Arias, 2007). Attention is similarly paid to the hypothesis about the existence of statistically significant differences regarding course quality depending on the platform that hosts the MOOC, analyzing the impact that the language or the presence of a didactic guide can have on the quality level of courses. The results obtained in the present study do not reveal widespread differences between courses, but statistically significant differences do exist in 5 of the 36 pedagogical quality indicators proposed.