MOOCs are large online courses in which any individual with access to the internet can enroll, usually for free. Distance and online education are not new, but the scale and scope of MOOCs raise novel questions about access to higher education, faculty work, and the adoption of new technologies for teaching and learning. There is little literature on the motivations, experiences and behaviors of faculty who teach MOOCs. This dissertation study seeks to illuminate this unexamined aspect of faculty work by answering the following research question: Why do faculty teach MOOCs, and how do their beliefs and experiences inside and outside the university shape their MOOC experience? I investigate the question of why university faculty decide to participate in a new and potentially risky form of online teaching, and how their beliefs, values, and experiences are connected with, and/or shape, their MOOC teaching practices.
I conducted a single-institution interview study of MOOC faculty at the University of Michigan. Michigan was an early partner of Coursera, a MOOC company, which announced its first set of offerings in April 2012. My methodology is derived from recent approaches to phenomenology (e.g. Seidman, 2005). I interviewed 16 U-M faculty and instructors who had taught at least one MOOC as of March, 2015. I also conducted observations at events where MOOC instructors were presenting as panelists and likely to be in attendance, and collected contextual information from publicly available videos, news coverage, and articles that involved the participants. Using a phenomenological approach to interviewing and analysis, I conducted multiple interviews with each participant, focusing on their lived experience and meaning-making of the MOOC experience. The professional growth perspective outlined by O’Meara, Terosky, and Neumann (2008) provides a set of sensitizing concepts for my approach to understanding MOOC faculty.
The findings provide a set of profiles of the study participants as well as thematic analysis on participants’ motivations for MOOC teaching, and their experiences. I identified four major reasons why instructors chose to teach a MOOC. There was rarely a single motivating factor, but rather several considerations that contributed to the decision. They were: Desire for a platform, interest in experimentation, altruism, and an aim to raise the profile of either themselves or their programs. Among the experiences of MOOC faculty, I note several themes, including: MOOC instructors’ assertions that they learned a great deal about teaching from doing the MOOC; the contrast between participants who felt isolated in their MOOC work and those who made connections; the increased visibility that came with MOOC teaching, which was sometimes a source of awkwardness and discomfort; and the balancing act MOOC teaching required, because of the enormous time demands of producing a MOOC and the already busy lives of successful faculty.
This study makes several contributions to the research on faculty work lives. First, provides insight into the experiences of faculty adopting a new educational technology in the early stage of development; MOOCs are new learning technologies that affect the way faculty teach, learn, and interact with students and that thus deserve study. It also evaluates the faculty growth framework, which is relatively new, as an analytical lens, as well as suggest possible expansions to the framework based on the findings emerging from my study.PHDHigher EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145913/1/mollyak_1.pd
