Abstract
This chapter introduces distance education and open education in Taiwan with a focus on its recent development on massive open online courses (MOOCs). To explore the MOOC experiences in Taiwan, we interviewed two MOOC design team members and their director at a local university. Our findings are presented in five emergent themes: the MOOC goals, the MOOC faculty recruitment, the MOOC design and development, the interaction on MOOCs, and the MOOC uses. We discuss the challenges, including the difficulty to recruit MOOC faculty, the lack of models and resources for MOOC design and development, and the lack of emphasis on peer learning to engage learners. We also discuss the opportunities that MOOCs bring to Taiwan from a global and local perspective, including transforming higher education into a learner-centered paradigm of education and advancing society. We hope MOOCs will continue to stimulate learners to achieve personal goals, to contribute to communities, and to advance society in Taiwan, which may be a way leading to the ultimate goal of education.
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Appendix
Appendix
The semi-structured interview scheme
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1.
When did your university initiate the MOOC project? When were you involved in the MOOC project? To what parts of the project have you contributed?
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2.
Based on your understanding, what was the university’s initial motivation for developing MOOCs? What are the current short-term and long-term goals?
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What is the university’s strategic plan to develop and promote MOOCs? How is it different from previous plans to promote distance education and open courseware? How has the experience in distance education and open courseware helped or hindered the development of MOOCs?
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What challenges have you encountered in the process of designing and developing MOOCs? How did you overcome them? What goals have you accomplished?
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Lin, CY., Chen, CH. (2017). From Distance Education to Massive Open Online Courses in Taiwan: Progressing with a Global Perspective and Local Commitments. In: Spector, M., Lockee, B., Childress, M. (eds) Learning, Design, and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17727-4_32-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17727-4_32-1
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