Students’ Perception and Experience of Massive Open Online Courses in Mongolia

Abstract

E-learning can be a potential solution to educational inequality problem in developing countries, like Mongolia, with vast land and sparse population. With the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), some impressive cases bring the attention of the public towards it. But there is no specific evidence that shows Mongolian students' experiences related to these online courses yet. Purpose of this study was to examine Mongolian students' MOOC perception and experience, especially influence of access, skills, and preferences in their practice. We used a 15-item questionnaire and results were based on 6846 students' responses. The study population consists of undergraduate students of the National University of Mongolia and high school students from 8 schools in Ulaanbaatar city. There was a significant difference between university and high school students in the awareness and enrollment rates. 47% of the students have heard of MOOCs and 2518 respondents (37%) had an experience of taking MOOCs. Our results show that students have a doubt about MOOC's academical quality and consider it as an additional source of learning materials. The results of this study can be used to compare students' perception from other developing countries.

MOOCs in STEM Education: Teacher Preparation and Views

“…For example, Parson et al (2019) reported that most teachers find MOOCs useful for professional development, which is in line with our results. However, some studies argue that MOOCs are not useful (Martin 2012 ; Miller 2012 ; Sukhbaatar et al 2018 ), which is in contrast to our result. These results show that MOOCs are a new online educational platform that warrants further research.…”

“…However, some participants are not interested in using MOOCs in their classes because they think that MOOCs reduce the quality of education and increase the workload and also because not every student has the technological infrastructure in their home. This result has been reported by some studies as well (Lederman 2013 ; Sukhbaatar et al 2018 ). This result indicates that those participants are not interested in improving themselves and learning about new approaches.…”

“…Besides, only about 25% of those who enroll in MOOCs complete the courses, which is one of the major setbacks (Bozna 2016 ; Castaño-Muñoz et al 2018 ; Jordan 2014 ; Radoiu 2014 ). Another setback is the inadequate technological infrastructure of MOOCs (Sukhbaatar et al 2018 ). However, MOOCs are becoming more and more popular and are increasingly used in higher education because they are free of charge, have open resources, promote student–student interaction and contextual learning, and break the limits of time and space.…”

Guiding the Students in High School by Using Machine Learning

“…Here is the principle: the more data is used, the more accurate the results will be. However, in contrary to the previous studies, here, the data was gathered from teachers ignoring the students' side [18].…”

“…This may weaken the results of the research because the variety and the differences in the opinions may lead to many useful results [30]. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in the field of education is very important and common as many researchers have been ready to employ artificial intelligence techniques to support the education system and increase academic success rates by building systems to assess students and predict their academic performance using automated learning algorithms ( [17], [18]), and many researches have achieved high accuracy and one of the researches was based on (Fuzzy Logic model) using (genetic algorithm) with a high accuracy rate of 84.52% [27].…”