Quality MOOCs (massive open online courses) ensure open learning under the top-down guidance of established criteria and standards. With an evaluative approach, course providers can use the guiding frameworks in designing and refining courses while fostering students’ targeted open learning competency. This study explores the openness embedded into MOOC course design and the anticipated core competency, gathering insights from interviews with in-service teachers preparing MOOC lessons. The findings suggest that teachers’ evaluative approach remains necessary in its cyclical practice, using prior experience as the primary foundation while also referencing national and international frameworks for course refinement. However, the teachers’ observed high reliance on early experience has resulted in an unstable foundation, where only a bottom-up experiential perspective is adopted, instead of an ideal balance with the top-down standards. From the teachers’ perspective, task completion is prioritized as the only primary learning outcome, despite open learning providing students with extensive opportunities to extend beyond in-class task challenges. Future studies should address this unbalanced perspective with a more diverse respondent pool and continue efforts to triangulate data through mixed-method approaches.

Keywords

ourse evaluation · criteria and standards · competency-based instruction · open learning · MOOCs · quality MOOCs · teacher perspective