Developing Critical Perspectives on Technology in Education: A Tool for MOOC Evaluation

The main aim of the study has been to provide students with the opportunity to approach online learning in a structured way, which can be applied in a variety of contexts. The goal is to overcome short term, instrumental learning which fails to exploit the educational potential of MOOCs. This paper is part of a wider research project, carried out within the Laboratory for Experimental Research – UniRomaTre, and focuses on the model adopted for evaluating the impact and effectiveness of online teaching and learning, enabling students to adopt a critical approach which could be extended to any online resource which they may use for their lifelong learning. It does not explore the quality of learning in online environments. Rather, it investigates how students should approach the online resources at their disposal, facilitating their critical and reflective skills and adopting a model for analysis. Hypothesis tested, methodology adopted and some results collected are described here.