Designing a Course for MOOC-enabled Flipped Learning

Two major challenges for higher education are improving learning quality for the 21st century?s creative economy; and reducing education cost for affordability. Flipped learning (FL) and Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) are emerging as two alternatives to the traditional education model of lecture-oriented passive learning. FL is mainly to deal with the first challenge while MOOC with the second one. So far, about 20% of UNIST?s courses have been redesigned for FL. By using a learning management system, an instructor monitors each student?s progress on a weekly basis to make sure that he/she does pre-class assignments and makes an early intervention if necessary. Many professors have difficulty to prepare materials for pre-class activities though they like the idea of FL. Now, UNIST has been making a new trial of a MOOC-enabled FL model where a student takes a proven high quality MOOC in lieu of in-house-made pre-class activities and is ready to participate in in-class activities such as class presentation, discussion. With an endorsement from the top leadership, the author took an unconventional way of designing a newly offered graduate course titled ?Business Analytics? for MOOC-enabled FL. Luckily, MIT offered a graduate-level MOOC course titled ?Analytics Edge? of which the coverage was equivalent to the new course at the same time. The author asked all of his five students in the course to enroll the MOOC course at the edX, a MOOC provider joinly established by MIT and Harvard in 2002. Each student paid the required fee directly to the edX to get a certificate upon completion. A week?s work consists of a series of video clips, self-quiz, and assignments. Instead of meeting twice, the class meets only once a week by substituting one with the self-study with the MOOC. When a student finished a week?s work, he/she is required to submit a summary report to the instructor. In a class meeting, the instructor asked a few students to do class presentation based on what they learned in the previous week and facilitated in-depth discussion. Students well accepted the new way of learning since the course was designed to combine the best of both MOOC and FL, thus resulting in better learning quality. Since this experiment was the first case in Korea, media and researchers show their interests in this type of learning model.