A Classroom at Home: Children, Youth, and the Lived World of Massive Open Online Courses

• In Event: 29.074 - Online Teaching and Learning SIG Paper Session 1

Abstract

This paper reports on a phenomenological research project that investigated what it was like for a child or a youth to learn in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We analysed lived experience descriptions gathered during interviews with ten North American, home-schooled children along with their parent(s) and youth, who had each completed at least one MOOC. Our study suggests that learning in a MOOC may create unique conditions, situations, and relations of pedagogical influence for children and youth, that are qualitatively different than those afforded in a face-to-face classroom or other online learning environments. In this paper, we highlight three themes that arose in our existential analyses of the collected lived experience descriptions.

Authors

• Catherine Adams, University of Alberta

• Yin Yin, University of Alberta