H-MOOC framework: reusing MOOCs for hybrid education

Abstract

Since Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) started to become part of the scene of Higher Education (HE), many institutions have joined the race of MOOC creation. However, producing MOOCs has shown to be a cumbersome and expensive activity for HE institutions. For this reason, many universities have started to explore and experiment with different hybrid initiatives and models in which locally produced and third-party MOOCs are reused and integrated into the traditional curriculum. Currently, few studies report on hybrid initiatives from the point of view of the institution in terms of efforts and benefits. Furthermore, most of the hybrid initiatives described in the literature focus on flipped classroom experiences, although there are some other possibilities for integrating MOOCs in the curriculum. In order to shed some light on the opportunities that arise from the reuse of MOOCs, this paper presents H-MOOC, a framework that describes hybrid MOOC-based initiatives as a continuum of two factors: (1) institutional effort to reuse an existing MOOC, and (2) curriculum alignment between the MOOC and the program, or the course hybridized. H-MOOC was created in order to facilitate the comparison of different hybrid MOOC-based initiatives. Several hybrid initiatives from the literature are analyzed in the context of the H-MOOC framework.