Blended learning with MOOCs: towards supporting the learning design process

For some time now, universities have been making a significant effort to develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). One way to leverage the effort invested in developing and carrying out MOOCs is to use the online courses or parts of them in traditional brick-and-mortar courses that are delivered on campus. There are several learning design strategies that consider the combination of face to face (f2f) learning in university courses with one or more MOOCs, though teachers are generally only familiar with the most typical approaches – for instance, the flipped classroom. The variety of combinations and possibilities offered by this type of education constitutes a new learning design space whose full potential is underexplored. The aim of this research is to present and explore the affordances offered by an authoring tool devoted to support the design of blended uses of MOOCs and its impact in the resulting learning designs. A workshop has been carried out with the objective of supporting participants in exploring the possibilities of using MOOCs in combination with the courses typically offered on university campuses. Participants were mainly university teachers as well as academic and administrative staff responsible for supporting the development of MOOCs. Results indicate that the authoring tool can support the process of learning design involving blended learning scenarios with MOOCs and can contribute to expanding the knowledge of this type of learning in teachers.