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Education quality enhancement through open education adaptation

Abstract:

Open Education is changing the educational paradigm. The consolidation of the OpenCourseWare initiative, supported by the top universities of the World, and the revolution generated in the recent years through the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses, present a new educational scenario for teachers, students and institutions. This new environment has furthered the use of e-learning, not only because of the benefits provided to students, such as flexibility of time and place, but also because anyone interested in training and learning, has access to a multitude of platforms with open resources and learning communities, not to mention the absence of admission processes or access requirements. The majority of times, this kind of courses will be the first contact between universities and students, which is of high importance regarding the prestige of the institutions. The formation of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people brings a challenge to teachers and their institutions, as they must be able to offer a course with very high quality to satisfy such a large number of students. For this reason, teachers need to develop new skills, such as managing multimedia elements or mass forums, to get an appropriate course to be published. As institutions are the final image and responsible for the courses, they must establish a process to monitor, facilitate and advise teachers to get an excellent final result. This paper shows the adaptation process that a group of teachers have developed in order to publish a course in the OpenCourseWare platform of the Technical University of Madrid. In this case, these teachers and a group of experts from the institution worked as a team to enhance the course before publishing it. As a result, the satisfaction perceived by the students who used these new materials was increased, and the published course has received a large amount of visitors as an Open Educational Resource. One of the strategic lines of the Open Education Office of the Technical University of Madrid is to promote the creation of Massive Open Online Courses from OpenCourseWare courses. This paper shows the benefits from this initiative. At this moment, the same group of teachers is developing the publication of this course as a Massive Open Online Course and many materials and multimedia resources need to be created. Besides, a new course design will be necessary to adapt the methodology to the massive conditions of the new model. To this point, teachers' opinions have been collected, and after the performance of this hard process, students' satisfaction and quality of the course will be measured to analyze the final results.