An agile framework definition for creating an engineering massive open online course from scratch: a case study

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as disruptors to higher education bringing the possibility to accesslearning contents to thousands of students from all over the world. MOOCs are a new way to design and deliver onlinelearning. Learners become part of an on-line community where they can participate as reviewers, collaborate with eachother and are engaged in watching videos and other multimedia resources. However, MOOCs are also generating a hugedebate around three different aspects: the learning process including evaluation and certification criteria, the lack of skillsamong instructors to design and plan MOOCs and the technical and security issues of MOOC platforms. More specifically,institutions are currently making a great effort to become part of main facilitators’ platforms. They are creating a goodnumber of methodologies, guidelines and best practices to equip instructors with the necessary skills to produce high-quality learning resources that can encourage learners’ participation and decrease the dropout rate. On the other hand,engineering education is one of the main areas of interest in MOOC courses. In the software and computer engineering areait ispossible to find a huge number of MOOCs in particular topicsranging from anintroductory to a master level. However,just a few courses address a holistic view of a domain such as software engineering due to the intrinsic difficulty ofsummarizing in a few weeks the main concepts of an engineering discipline. That is why, in this paper, authors introduce anAgile MOOC Development Lifecycle (AMDL) to address the challenge of designing a MOOC from scratch. Afterwards,the framework is applied to create a MOOC course about software engineering for a non-technical audience and developedby a large and multidisciplinary team of 18 instructors. This experience is also reported as a case study to validate theproposed development lifecycle. Finally, some discussion, lessons learned and future research lines are also outlined.