Page 179 - Open and Distance Education In Asia : Good Practice From AAOU Members

Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU) 159

LMS; licensing the whole course under courses offered by the Higher Education
the Creative Commons system; and Institutions (HEIs) of the country; and
partnership with a major industry for the designing MOOCs to correspond to the
courses to respond to the knowledge and content of the credit courses to facilitate
skills needs of the industry. As implied, the crediting of MOOCs towards a degree
2012 also started UPOU’s extensive program which was one of the major
production of its own open educational concerns at that time. The idea was to
resources (OERs) as materials for the increase the acceptability of MOOCs and
credit courses the university offers and also to lower the cost of higher education
to provide the content for the MOOCs it through the open courses and contribute
is developing. towards making higher education more
• With the initial experience of developing accessible and inclusive. A MOOC was
and offering MOOCs, UPOU also held designed to be equivalent to one credit
in 2014 MOOCathon or the unending unit in terms of content. Usually, credit
conversation about the UPOU MOOCs. courses in the Philippines at tertiary
The focus of the discussion was on the level carry 3 credit units, hence one
LMS for UPOU MOOCs. This resulted in course is equivalent to three MOOCs.
the change of the MOOC LMS from @ This initiative started the advocacy
ral to model (Massive Open Distance of “MOOCs as OERs” where students
eLearning). The learning platform was enrolled in the credit course offered by
also powered by Moodle and is still being the HEI can be enrolled in the equivalent
used up to the present. It can be accessed MOOCs and learn the content together
at https://model.upou.edu.ph (Figure with the other MOOC learners. The
3). The model LMS also aligns with the teacher can opt to provide the additional
university’s articulation of what it does: assessment to validate the learnings
open learning; DE; and e-learning which of the students from the MOOC. In
implies the integration of the internet/ this project, the five (5) courses under
modern ICTs into the DE framework to the Service Management Program,
differentiate it from elearning integrated recognized as cognate for some degree
into the conventional or residential mode programs became the basis for the
of instruction. content of the OERs and MOOCs. There
• In the same year, 2014, and using the were15 MOOCs developed and offered
model platform, another set of MOOCs, in partnership with the IT Business
on Service Management Program, was Process Association of the Philippines
offered by UPOU with funding from the (IT-BPAP). These MOOCs were also
Asian Development Bank. These MOOCs, designed to provide pool of manpower
aside from adopting the UPOU MOOC for the Business Process Outsourcing
model of 2012, also have the following (BPO) industry in the country.
features: aligning the content of the
OERs produced with the content of credit

University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU)