Integrating MOOCs in Physics preliminary undergraduate education: beyond large size lectures

MOOCs have had an impressive coverage in press and social media since Siemens’ “educational experiment” in 2008 (Siemens, 2012). They have been seen as a leverage to renew Higher Education (Brown, Calkins, & Siemens, 2012; Knox, 2014), and the research community gave attention in several cycles of discussion (Liyanagunawardena, Lundqvist, & Williams, 2015; Raffaghelli, Cucchiara, & Persico, 2015). According to Liyanagunawardena et al. (2015), after a first phase of focus on MOOCs and the institutional models, more recently the literature has explored and applied pedagogical and technological approaches with room for some criticism regarding aspects like drop-out rates (Hill, 2013), cultural translations (Nkuyubwatsi, 2014) and sustainability (Yuan, Powell, & Olivier, 2014). Amongst the problems explored, the issue of how MOOCs can be integrated to improve quality education is a crucial issue (Ghislandi, 2016). In fact, it encompass the debate on how MOOCs could concretely revolution higher education models by improving access and supporting more flexible learning approaches. In the case of sciences and particularly Math, it is well known the impact of Khan Academy and other types of video-resources informally adopted by students as well as the success of other scientific areas; however, more research on more institutionalized models in this area is necessary (Colvin et al., 2014). In this paper, the authors introduce a research on the design, implementation and evaluation of an undergraduates programme aimed at supporting students in achieving the basics of Physics, as crucial baseline for further undergraduate studies in Sciences and Engineering. The authors introduce the blended approach, based on a number of MOOCs delivered through POK (PoliMi Open Knowledge, http://www.pok.polimi.it), the MOOCs portal of Politecnico di Milano; as well as face-to-face activities that included intensive technology enhanced learning, like feed-back based on clickers. The authors explain the process of implementation of the approach and its impact as perceived by students. The several elements of the approach (the tutors’ pedagogy, the adoption of clickers, the diversity amongst learning groups) are compared against the importance of the MOOC within and for the overall experience. Finally, it is discussed how MOOCs can impact Physics at preliminary undergraduate level, focusing how quality higher education can be achieved in this area.