Designing an Educational Action Task Force for MOOCs and Online Course Production

Abstract

Although the research literature on online courses, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), has proliferated, surprisingly few studies have explored the organisational approach to a generic institutional strategy for supporting educators when developing online courses in higher education (HE). The goal of this paper is therefore to describe and conceptualise the outline of an infrastructure for organising the production of online courses in continuous and further education. Central to the infrastructure is the Educational Action Task Force (EATF), a network consisting of employees with complementary competences (c.f. technical, pedagogical and multimedia) that can coach, mentor and support educators through the entire online course production process in designated teams. In this article, we outline the design of the online course production process in the EATF teams. The design is stepwise and collaborative, and aims to contribute to a seamless and quality-assured strategy that caters for the various goals that content creators may have within the scope of the strategic goals in the organisation.