A phenomenographic study in the UK higher education academics’ experiences of designing MOOCs

Wang, Xiaoxia and Sime, Julie-Ann (2025) A phenomenographic study in the UK higher education academics’ experiences of designing MOOCs. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the variation in the United Kingdom (UK) higher education (HE) academics’ experiences of designing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The emergence of MOOCs as a new form of online teaching has attracted a lot of interest from HE providers and researchers, but there is little published research about HE academics’ experiences of designing MOOCs. In practice, the process of designing MOOCs typically involves MOOC providers instructing academics with prescribed procedure and format, lacking understanding of their conceptions of this phenomenon. This research aims to fill the research gap through a phenomenographic study in UK HE academics’ experiences of designing MOOCs to reveal their qualitatively different ways in understanding this phenomenon. Phenomenography is often used to investigate the qualitatively different ways that people experience or understand the world around them. Twenty-two academics from six universities, who have experience of designing MOOCs on the UK-based platform FutureLearn, were interviewed. The data analysis revealed six categories of description: content-focused perspective, social learning perspective, teamwork perspective, development perspective, HE perspective and transformation perspective. Each category is discussed in relation to the relevant research findings in the existing literature. The hierarchically inclusive relationship between the categories is discussed to explain the expanding awareness of the phenomenon demonstrated in the final outcome space. This research contributes to knowledge about HE academics’ understandings of designing MOOCs, an area with limited prior research. The research findings provide course designers and MOOC development stakeholders with a better understanding and awareness of the variation in academics’ conceptions of this phenomenon, which helps to reflect on and enhance the policy making and practice of the development of MOOCs, as well as academic professional development in this area. It also expands research context of phenomenography, demonstrating how this approach effectively uncovers variation in academics’ understandings of the phenomenon “designing MOOCs”.