The Efficacy of MOOC to Support Students in Pedagogical Research

Abstract

The article deals with methods and methodology of pedagogical research in the didactics of informatics in the environment of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) based on the principles of connectivism, which offers open, non-formal, and community education. The MOOC was created as a support for the implementation of pedagogical research (primarily for final theses), specifically for solving a causal research problem, which is the most challenging research issue in pedagogical research. We found that the created MOOC is didactically effective for all study degrees. We also identified the parts of the course (which correspond to the stages of processing the experiment) causing the participants the biggest problems. The surprising finding was that the data understanding (data exploration phase) causes the problem the most. Its importance was underestimated when designing the MOOC. Although this phase is the least computationally demanding, it is very important since it is subsequently related to the correct determination of the null statistical hypotheses.