 Hello everyone and greetings to you all attending the national seminar organized by Indira Gandhi National Open University. I thank the university, especially the vice chancellor and my colleagues at the Stop Training and Research Institute of Distance Education for the invitation and giving me this opportunity to speak to you today via video. I will be available after the video presentation for a question and answer session. Keeping the topic assigned to me, I have taken the liberty to rephrase the title of my talk as guidelines for design, development and delivery of massive open online courses MOOCs. Many of you who are present in the seminar know about the Commonwealth of Learning, the organization that I currently represent. For the benefit of others, we are an intergovernmental organization established by the Commonwealth heads of government in 1987. We serve 53 Commonwealth countries to use technology and distance education to improve access and quality of education. Over the last quarter century of our existence, we have witnessed the growth of open distance and online learning, not only in the Commonwealth, but also around the world. Personally, I have benefited from the experiences of working in many organizations, including IGNO, where I promoted online learning through my work. When I am asked by educational leaders about how to start a MOOC, I normally give three points for consideration. First, reputation of the institution or professor who would teach or offer the course. Being an event and to attract large number of learners, you need to have the celebrity effect. Second, you need to have a specialized course to offer to attract large number of enrollment from across the world. You do not want to spend time and energy needed for delivering a MOOC and get just 100 students that may be accommodated in any face-to-face situations. Third, delivering MOOC needs technological infrastructure. Is your organization ready for the change? Do you have the resources to join the big players with MOOC platforms? Are you ready to invest the cost of developing a MOOC? Beyond these three points, there are many more issues to be addressed. I am currently working on the theme and would reflect on my experiences and research to call upon the open and distance learning institutions to think in the directions of using MOOCs. Therefore, before I start to talk about these, I must start with a background. As MOOCs are emerging, they are interpreted differently by different people. MOOC is defined as, and I quote, courses designed for large number of participants that can be accessed by anyone anywhere as long as they have an internet connection or open to everyone without entry qualifications and offer a full, complete course experience online for free. Massive in this context relates to the possible enrollment in a course. But the question is what size this massive refers to? The normal perception is that the number is unmanageable in a campus classroom or for that matter in an online course. According to Stephen Downs, a course with 150 active learners can be treated as massive due to the amount of activities that happen in the process. The suggestion of 150 comes from Dunbar's number that indicates the cognitive limits to the number of people with whom one can maintain a stable relationship. We have seen courses with more than 100,000 students in the past, though the average of students enrollment has been around 40,000. Open means the course is open to anyone to register, though the notion of openness has been changing due to the emerging business models of MOOCs. Many of the MOOCs are now migrating to a paid model or a premium model and mostly the contents are not available with an open license as open educational resources. Online is the most clear of the four terms in the phrase MOOC. It means that all the learners perform all the activities online without any requirement to attend face-to-face classes or examination. However, there are variations of MOOCs, typically called blended MOOCs, where some of the activities may require face-to-face interactions. There are also MOOCs that provide meet-up options to find learners who are locally available for peer interaction or coffee. Some MOOCs conduct proctored examination. The last word, course, is in common use. A course is typically a unit of study that is offered by an institution and formally taught by one or more teachers over a period of time with end-of-course assessment to provide grade and or certification. However, MOOCs are still not treated equivalent to formal courses in universities and there are several reasons for that. One of these is the equivalent credit value. Now let me turn to the history of MOOCs to provide a better context of the design principles that I am going to propose. In fact, the term MOOC was coined in 2008. Does that mean there were no MOOCs before? For some, open universities have been teaching large number of learners before and MOOC is only a kind of open education in the digital world. Some even go further and claim that Cissan Street was the first MOOC that used television and broadcasting to prepare large number of preschool children. The widely accepted first-ever MOOC was offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downs at University of Manitoba, Kanada in 2008. When they opened a non-credit course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge to over 2,200 students enrolled free to its online version while a group of 25 fee-fed learners had a campus experience. I was one of the students online in this course. Even before this, David Wiley offered an open course entitled Introduction to Open Education using Wiki and Blocks in 2007. If some of you in the audience remember, at IGNO, we conducted an eight-week online training for self-learning materials using Wiki in 2008. We were unaware of the potentials of what we were engaged in at that time, which turned into so big that attracted the imagination and interests of so many people worldwide. The New York Times declared year 2012 as the year of the MOOC. This happened due to the unprecedented success of the MOOCs offered by the Stanford, MIT and Harvard. For example, the Stanford MOOC on artificial intelligence attracted more than 160,000 students from 209 countries. It is important to note that 23,000 students completed the course. In 2013, Professor Asha Kanwar, President and CEO of Commonwealth of Learning expressed optimism over MOOC. When she said, can the ugly duckling of open distance learning turn into a swan due to MOOC affect? From a pedagogical perspective, we can see the trends in MOOC in two directions. C MOOC and X MOOC. The approach in C MOOC is to provide a platform to the learners to connect to individuals and resources and emphasizes learning through creativity, autonomy and social networking. On the other hand, the X MOOC approach is to focus on traditional video presentation and testing in addition to use of division of teaching labor with the learners engaged in the course. While technology can help customize learning experiences, most do not simulate the one-to-one learning experience. Therefore, the phenomenon of dropout is very high in the MOOCs as that of the open distance learning system. At present, the dropout rates in MOOCs are about 90%. Like any educational innovation, we need to question why MOOCs? What affordances it provides us to adopt it? Certainly, we can't afford the brick-and-mortar system of education to meet the educational demands of large number of people. And open universities feel that need successfully. With the advances in technology, some universities adopted quickly and others lagged behind in the technology race to improve access and quality. Today's need is just-in-time learning, workplace-based learning and bite-size learning, especially in the context of 21st century learning. Many governments and educational institutions are planning to use MOOCs. And some of their reasons are to provide increased access to quality education for large number of learners. To provide just-in-time training to improve the quality of education by using additional skills and learning opportunities. To provide lifelong learning opportunities to citizens. To build brand online and for marketing of regular courses. To improve revenue stream for the organization. Let me now focus on MOOCs as pedagogical innovations and the benefits offered by some of the common characteristics of MOOCs. To help you think about using these while designing MOOC. Online delivery improves efficacy of learning. Online quizzes and assessments improves retrieval learning. Short video and quizzes help mastery learning. Peer and self-assessment enhances metacognition for the learner. Short video improves attention and focus. Online forums promote peer assistance. And community building improves collaboration, networking and belongingness for the institution. So, here is an innovation that combines the best of all educational technologies put together. Open and distance learning has been criticized in the past for lack of interaction and high turnaround time for assignments. The MOOCs provide us an opportunity to turn these criticisms in favor of the pedagogical practices of distance education. Providing personalized learning and identifying at-risk learners have been challenging so far. With the use of sophisticated learning analytics, it is now possible to add filters to know how a group or individual learner is performing and who may drop out early. We can help these learners when they know who they are. With these backgrounds, let me now focus on some guidelines for integrating MOOCs into distance teaching institutions. Planning. Designing a MOOC is designing a course for the online learner. The best that can be done is to have a guess about the nature of the learners and articulate the same as who should take the MOOC with the hope that others for whom the course is not intended would not join. Contrary to the perception of improving access to those deprived of quality education, current data about enrollments in MOOC shows that most of the learners are those who have already completed a graduate degree and most come for enhancing their career prospects. There is also some kind of trend that MOOC learners are serial MOOC takers. They take MOOCs for different reasons, including experimenting and trying to know what is happening in a course. This means you can experiment with MOOC. You need to be first-time right. Otherwise, you are losing thousands of learners and jeopardize institutional credibility. MOOCs are not delivered alone. Unlike typical online course offered using a learning management system, you need many players to make success of a MOOC. You not only need technology and media experts to handle some components of developing the contents for media, you also need research and teaching assistants to support students and mark assignments. So, identify and build a team of support staff to develop and run your MOOC. Give lead time to design and develop a MOOC. The University of British Columbia guide for MOOC suggests lead time of about four to six months of preparatory time before launching MOOC. And at least four to six weeks gap between announcement and actual startup MOOC. The overall MOOC completion rate is about seven to ten percent. Thus, in order to be successful, you must ensure high enrollment through appropriate marketing strategy, using social media campaign and other tools online as well as offline. Develop a realistic budget for the course by taking into consideration all items of expenditure, including the time of the content experts, developers and teaching assistants. I also suggest setting a benchmark for completed learners and active learners to help calculate the cost per completed learner and cost per active learner to measure the effectiveness of the course. Designing MOOCs are like events. They have a start and an end date. So, it is important to design to follow the tempo of the beginning, the middle and the end. Include a good introduction for the MOOC to hook the learners. Even design a trailer like a film to attract more learners. And this trailer video should be part of the marketing campaign. Since the dropout rate in MOOCs is high, it is important to understand the intent of the learners to help decide the nature of dropouts. Therefore, design a survey instrument and use this at the starting point of interaction with the learners. Such data will be useful at the time of analyzing who completes and why. Depending upon the nature of the course, use video, quizzes, peer assessment, discussion forum, projects, etc. appropriately to cover the competencies you want the learners to have at the end of the course. While developing the curriculum, consider the depth of the course and keep the cognitive load at a reasonable level to help the learners complete the course. This also calls for asking yourself for what types of courses MOOCs should be used. If the student workload is too high in a week, will the learner be able to complete? Should you increase the duration of the course to accommodate the learning requirements? While designing the pace of the course and workload, consider about 3 to 4 hours of study time per week. In distance education, we consider about 14 to 16 hours per week of workload. Design the assessment rubrics containing criteria and expected outcomes to be demonstrated or performed by the learners. These become part of the announcements to help people know the requirements of the course to get a certificate. Identify the activities and types of quizzes and resources that will be included in the course. We recommend the use of suitable open license resources unless you have the rights or can get permission from the original copyright holder. Decide on the number of audio and video to be used and their appropriateness. As a rule of thumb, videos may be used to show processes and create authentic learning environments rather than only using as a lecture capture method. Use of video and audio can also provide multiple perspectives and show issues in context. Preparation of such audio and video, however, would be time and cost intensive. Research shows that the average engagement time of any MOOC lecture video maxes out at 6 minutes. Therefore, it is important to plan only relevant video and each of them should be of about 6 minutes. Also, shorter videos and videos where the instructors are highly enthusiastic are more engaging. It has been found that videos that are recorded in more informal settings are preferred by the learners. Thus, you really don't need a big studio for recording. Technology choice. Considering the number of learners joining a MOOC, there is a need for cloud infrastructure. And you also need to identify the best MOOC platform that will solve your problems. There are many options such as open edX, Google course builder, canvas, and MOOC it. There are several hosted options available. Or you may also like to join the big players such as Coursera and edX. However, the most important aspect is cost associated with running and developing courses in many of these platforms. Data on cost varies. And considering this, the common other learning has been supporting the development of a low cost MOOC platform called MOOC it at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Call has now started a hosted solution for partner institutions to try and run courses before they can actually start on their own. The MOOC it provides all important features of a course and has some special features like playing audio of a video lecture on a mobile phone, registering with social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and also using these for online discussions. Development. Once the course and technology plans are ready, you should be developing the content and putting all the pieces of the MOOC puzzle in place. Practically, at this time, you have already announced the course and the registration have started to pour in. You need a team and project management skills to develop the course videos and faculty need assistance for putting the digital assets into the MOOC platform. You should also plan and undertake test runs, especially for all the features before making open to all. Testing is crucial from the perspective of doing right, first time, every time. Delivery. It is important to plan for the delivery of the course. While the platform is the delivery medium, you can think of creating other opportunities for the learners to meet up, engage in blended learning opportunities or participate and use other social networking tools. Sometimes an individual expert teaching a MOOC is great, but most use teaching assistants and do team teaching. So, identify and select a team of experts who would be doing the talking on screen and who would be doing the assessment and facilitation of the discussion forums. However, in a MOOC, the discussion forums are not moderated, but your teaching assistants may be allowed to provide administrative, technical and academic help needed by the learners. Deliberating the MOOC as per schedule is something that is extremely important and so must go on as planned week by week. Evaluation and feedback. Most of the student assessment is done using quizzes in the MOOC, though some other expect submission of assignments and undertaking projects. Normally, these are not assessed by the tutors. Peer assessment is used with a set of rubrics to help the learners assess others' work and also help learners focus on their own work. Plan for an exit survey of the participants to know what worked and what not. Such an evaluation will help triangulation of data from the initial intent survey and actual learning analytics recorded in the platform. While these are some practical tips for designing effective MOOCs, what is important is the nature of the transactions in the discussion forums and the quality of content delivered by the teachers. Let me now turn to some of the implications of MOOCs for distance teaching institutions. By and large, MOOC is a teacher-centered approach to teaching and learning. From a transactional distance perspective, MOOCs generally reflect high learner autonomy, medium level of structure giving flexibility to the students to deviate from the structure provided and low level of student-teacher dialogue, but a very high level of learner-learner dialogue. Thus, for open and distance learning institutions, MOOC provides the best fit to improve the quality of educational transaction. It promotes learner autonomy and self-directed learning, provides a structured approach to content design and delivery, and improves the possibility of creating a community of practice. From the perspective of community of inquiry model of online learning, MOOCs provide a high degree of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. So, how can distance teaching institutions take advantage of the MOOCs, improve access and quality while reducing costs? We have to understand and accept that MOOCs are an extension of what open and distance learning institutions have been doing, and it is logical to adopt the right technology to improve efficiency and effectiveness. However, business as usual approach, including the current model of MOOC delivery, may not always be the right solution. So, there is a need to think differently. Can we think of delivering programs instead of courses via these MOOC platforms? Convert the MOOC to MOOC, massive open online programs. The affordances of technologies like MOOCIT now make it easier for developing country institutions to offer programs to large number of learners without compromising on quality. Combined with the use of open educational resources, the MOOCs have the potential to transform the lifelong learning scenario for all of us. Thank you very much for your attention.