Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Aug 31, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 6, 2018 - Sep 20, 2018
Date Accepted: Dec 14, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) Evaluation Methods: Protocol for a Systematic Review
Background:
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have increased in popularity in recent years. They target a wide variety of learners and use novel teaching approaches, yet often exhibit low completion rates (10%). It is important to evaluate MOOCs to determine their impact and effectiveness, but little is known at this point about the methodologies that should be used for evaluation.
Objective:
The purpose of this paper is to provide a protocol for a systematic review on MOOC evaluation methods.
Methods:
We will use the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines for reporting this protocol. We developed a population, intervention, comparator, and outcome (PICO) framework to guide the search strategy, based on the overarching question, “What methods have been used to evaluate MOOCs?” The review will follow six stages: 1) literature search, 2) article selection, 3) data extraction, 4) quality appraisal, 5) data analysis, and 6) data synthesis.
Results:
The systematic review is ongoing. We completed the data searches and data abstraction in October and November 2018. We are now analyzing the data and expect to complete the systematic review by March 2019.
Conclusions:
This systematic review will provide a useful summary of the methods used for evaluation of MOOCs and the strengths and limitations of each approach. It will also identify gaps in the literature and areas for future work.
International Registered Report:
DERR1-10.2196/12087
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.