Αυτορρυθμιζόμενη μάθηση και MOOCs: μια εναλλακτική πρόταση μη τυπικής εκπαίδευσης ; Self-regulated learning and MOOCs: an alternative proposal to non-formal education

In September 2015, UNESCO set the global agenda with the sustainable development goals to be achieved by 2030. In terms of education, its importance for the social and economic development of people was recognized, while its goal was set to ensure a fair and inclusive quality of education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. This goal seems to be achievable with Open Massive Online Courses or MOOCs, as they are widely known, as they offer higher education to millions of people around the world. Nevertheless, a large percentage of those who enroll in the courses never complete them, showing very small completion rates ranging from 5-15%. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate whether instructional design, the overall organization of the program, and the use of the developed micro-application (MCII+), can help learners develop their degree of self-regulation by achieving higher performance and higher completion rates than standard. For this reason, a MOOC training program on "Violence and Bullying in schools" was designed and implemented, which was hosted on an OpenEdx platform that we installed and configured on a virtual server of the University of the Aegean. The course lasted 8 weeks and consequently, the research was conducted from 3/2 to 29/3 of 2020. The program was attended mainly by teachers from all levels of education, but also education staff, students, and individuals from all over Greece. The research questions were related to the investigation of the factors that affect the self-regulation of the students before their enrollment in the program, during it, and after its completion. Questions were also asked about the contribution of the educational material to the motivation of the students. The research data were collected using three different questionnaires that were answered in three phases of the program, beginning, middle, and end, as well as data from the course platform itself (performance), the Google Analytics service (traffic), and the micro-application which ...