Chemistry Massive Open Online Course: Validity, reliability and undergraduate students’ perception

A Chemistry MOOC was developed in the OpenLearning platform as an effort to assist the related universities in achieving the government’s desire in globalizing online learning. Many factors need to be considered in designing a MOOC. It is a series of instructional content delivered over the Internet and access to a huge number of learners from different locations connected at different times. The Chemistry MOOC developed in this study showed good validity and reliability for both the e-content and e-assessment modules. Furthermore, perceptions from the undergraduate students revealed that they have strong performance expectancy in using this MOOC as they believed that it helps them have a better performance in the future. Students rated Internet connection as their main usage barrier in using MOOC, but they have the least problems with the material presented. To improve the instructional design of this MOOC, researchers need to overcome the interaction issue, which gained the lowest mean score among the instructional design elements. Further investigation on the effectiveness of Chemistry MOOC on students’ cognitive performance and social development needs to be done as a summative evaluation of the ADDIE instructional design model. Besides, it is expected that the Chemistry MOOC can positively influence chemistry learning and teaching from a global perspective. Hence, a research collaboration between different countries could be done to compare the different perspectives among the learners from the countries.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based upon research financially supported by Sultan Idris Education University via Geran Penyelidikan Khas Universiti (Pendidikan) under Grant no. 2018-0046-107-01.