Blended MOOCs acceptance and use: A cross-cultural study of the factors affecting lecturers' use of bMOOCs

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have a significant impact on traditional teaching and learning in Higher Education institutions. Specifically, the use of MOOCs contents as part of F2F courses’ activities in blended learning format, an approach called blended MOOCs (bMOOCs) and are not intended to replace traditional learning methods but rather to enhance them. Most research on bMOOCs has focused on students’ perception and institutional threats whereas there is a lack of published research on academics’ perceptions and attitude of bMOOCs. Thus, the main purpose of the study is to investigate the impact of the characteristics of MOOCs on the use of bMOOCs by lecturers in universities. Furthermore, since culture plays a significant role in how individuals adopt a new technology, the study investigates the impact within two different cultures namely, the Anglophone and the Saudi Arabian. With regards to how MOOCs could be integrated in formal education, it can be realised from the review of literature that there have been few attempts to date to describe in depth the various ways in which MOOCs have been integrated with formal teaching and learning, this means that there are few guides for practitioners and that it is difficult for the research community to compare different examples. Thus, one of the main contributions of this study is to propose a hierarchy classification of how MOOCs are used for blended learning by presenting a systematic literature review leading to an analysis of 20 different case studies, which is then validated by an independent expert review. The resulting classification model differentiates between Supplementary and Integrated bMOOCs, where Integrated can itself be broken down into models that focus on Content, Assessment, or Interaction. The study shows that there are at least eight different models for using MOOCs within formal teaching and learning. To investigate the impact of the characteristics of MOOCs on lecturers’ use of blended MOOCs, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is adopted in this study to understand the individual behavioural intention to use a new technology, in our case blended MOOCs. Hence, this study proposes a new model based on the TAM model that is extended to include six external factors related to the characteristics of MOOCs namely High Quality Resources of a MOOC (QR), Availability of Useful Tools in a MOOC (AUT), Large Number of MOOCs Participants' engagement (LNP), A Completion Certificate from a MOOC (CC), MOOCs Delivery Platform’s Features (PF) and Similarity of MOOCs to Traditional Courses (STC). The aim of this model is to enable better understanding of the most influential characteristic on lecturers’ use of bMOOCs. The study follows a sequential mixed method design that gathers qualitative and quantitative data in an ordered sequence. The first phase, which included interviews with twelve experts from Computer Science and Education disciplines, provided support to the proposed model and inspired improvements. The second phase included a large-scale quantitative study that gathered data from 192 lecturers through an online questionnaire; the model was then assessed using Stepwise Regression Analysis for the two different cultures. Lastly, the results were further explained through a follow-up questionnaire from both cultures. The main finding was that the high-quality materials of MOOCs were found to be a key motivator for using MOOCs in traditional teaching in both cultures followed by the perceived usefulness of MOOCs to enhance lecturers’ performance. One interesting observation in this study was regarding Perceived Ease of Use of bMOOCs (PEOU) which was found to have no significant direct effect on lecturers’ Perceived Usefulness in the Anglophone sample and on the other hand, PEOU had no significant direct effect on the lecturers’ Behaviour intention on the Saudi sample. One of the main differences between the two cultures is that Similarity of MOOCs to Traditional Courses (STC) was found to have a significant positive effect on Perceived Usefulness in the Saudi sample whereas Similarity of MOOCs to Traditional Courses (STC) was found to have a significant negative direct effect on Perceived Ease of Use in the Anglophone sample and the follow-up questionnaire finding revealed further explanations and justifications. The research contributes to the body of knowledge in the fields of technology acceptance research, blended E-learning and cross-cultural research theoretically and practically. It also demonstrates the importance and benefits of MOOCs in traditional teaching and learning from lecturers’ perspective.

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ORCID for Wendy Hall: orcid.org/0000-0003-4327-7811

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