Developing and Validating the Mooc-based Curriculum Scale in Higher Education

Massive open online courses as one of the latest educational technologies have caused fundamental and quality changes to educational processes at the level of different universities and it's expanding rapidly. Mooc entails an online learning environment that is considered as the latest revolution in online education and learning. These comprehensive learning courses have provided many people with access to knowledge that was not easy in the past. Mooc is a course aimed at highly interactive participation and open access via the Internet. Despite the importance of this issue, there is still no standard scale to measure Mooc-based Curriculum, so the current research was conducted with the aim of building and validating a curriculum scale based on Mooc in higher education.

The research design is mixed method and the research method in the qualitative part is document review. In this regard, qualitative data was first collected and analyzed, then based on the qualitative results obtained, quantitative data was collected and analyzed and then the results of the quantitative part were used to better explain the qualitative findings. The statistical population also included Iranian and foreign sources in the field of virtual, electronic and Mooc education. In order to access texts and articles related to Persian and English keywords, curriculum, Mooc, virtual education, e-learning, online courses which are indexed in many internal electronic resources and electronic sources abroad were used to extract the latest sources related to the current research. Therefore, from 2000 to 2019, available and rich sources were studied in line with the current research and using the theme analysis method, 62 inclusive themes, 7 organizers and one comprehensive theme were discovered. The research method was quantitative, descriptive-survey and the statistical population consisted of 386 faculty members of University of Mazandaran. According to Morgan sampling table and based on relative stratified sampling, 181 people were selected as the sample. The data collection tool was a researcher-made questionnaire in the quantitative part, the content validity of which was 0.83 and the reliability was based on Cronbach's alpha coefficient and above 0.92. The research instrument was the Mooc curriculum scale with 7 subscales and 46 items on a five-point Likert scale.

The results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that Mooc-based curriculum includes managerial, technological, manpower issues, goal, content, teaching-learning strategies and evaluation. The values of TLI and CFI indices were at the desired level and higher than the cut-off point of 0.90. Therefore, the factor model had a good fit with the data.

Since Mooc is a course that aims for a lot of interactive participation and free access through the Internet and is considered as a source for learning and training, it can be said that this method has many more attractions than the traditional methods. On the other hand, nowadays, the existence of numerous unreliable sources of information on the Internet has become a big challenge for people, and access to websites can help those who are looking for information, because its content is prepared by reputable institutions and it is easy to understand whether the source is reliable or not.