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INTRODUCTION
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a new trend in education. These kinds of courses facilitate open access completely; also, the MOOCs are free for the learners [1]. The main differences regarding traditional online courses are the unlimited participation of learners and the fact they are ‘signed up to’ on a voluntary basis rather than being part of a defined cohort or an independent learner [2].
In addition, MOOCs are focused on the learning process based on the principles of ‘just in time learning’. Thus, the learners access materials on demand when they need to know something or they need to develop a particular skill set [1], [3].
Since the emergence of the massive open online courses, several web platforms offer MOOCs in different domains. In the particular case of the climate monitoring for crop management (agroclimatic), Coursera [4] offers 5 related MOOCs and edX [5] presents 3 MOOCs. Table 1 shows a summary of the MOOCs offered by the mentioned web platforms.
Table 1 Summary of the MOOCs
| Platform | MOOC | Institution | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coursera | Sustainable agricultural land management | University of Florida | English |
| Coursera | Agriculture, economics and nature | University of Western Australia | English |
| Coursera | Agricultura urbana y periurbana | National Autonomous University of Mexico | Spanish |
| Coursera | Climate adaptation in Africa | University of Cape Town | English |
| Coursera | Climate change and water in mountains: a global concern | University of Geneva | English |
| edX | AGRIMONITOR: Agricultural policy, food security and climate change | Inter-American Bank for Development | English/ Spanish |
| edX | Introduction to Environmental Science | Dartmouth College | English |
| edX | Climate Change Education | Inter-American Bank for Development | English |
Although, the mentioned massive open online courses present topics related with agriculture and climate, these MOOCs lack of the issues presented below:
The knowledge of the learners in agricultural or climate must be advanced.
75 % of the MOOCs are offered in English language.
The MOOCs are not focused on the crop management through monitoring of climate elements and factors.
To tackle the aforementioned issues, we proposed a MOOC named “agroclimatic tools for crop protection” focused on agricultural-sector native Spanish speakers. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 1 explains the canvas of the proposed MOOC; Section 2 presents the results and Section 3 provides the conclusions and future work.
1. MOOC CANVAS
In this section, we explain the design of the proposed MOOC: “agroclimatic tools for crop protection”. To construct this MOOC, we adapted the methodology in [6] according to the following steps:
1.1 Human
The people involved in the development of the MOOC as teachers and audiovisual communication team are members of Project MOOC MenTES-“Construcción de capacidades para la gestión de MOOC para la formación profesional, el desarrollo rural y nuevas generaciones de estudiantes rurales en el Mejoramiento de su Tránsito a la Educación Superior” (Develop of capacities for the management of MOOCs for professional training, rural development and new generations of rural students in the improvement to higher education). The members are described in detail bellow.
1.1.1 Human resources
The MOOC is conducted by three teachers with experience in machine learning algorithms, environmental sciences and agroclimatic monitoring. Table 2 presents the teachers profiles.
Table 2 Teachers profile of the MOOC: agroclimatic tools for crop protection.
| Teacher | Profession | Experience |
|---|---|---|
| David Camilo Corrales | Ph. D. in Telematics Engineering and Ph. D. in Computer Science | Design of machine learning algorithms for detection of diseases and pest in crops. |
| Apolinar Figueroa | Ph. D. in Biological Science | Evaluation of environmental impact for tropical ecosystems. |
| Juan Carlos Corrales | Ph. D. in Computer Science | Agroclimatic monitoring from Service Oriented Architectures. |
Source: own elaboration.
1.2 Intellectual resources
We used intellectual resources as technical reports, research papers and books to support the concepts presented in the MOOC.
1.3 Equipment
1.3.1 Hardware resources
The team of audiovisual and multimedia communication used the following hardware resources for recording the MOOC videos: Sony FS7 camera (1 item), Sony UWP-D11 (1 item), Teleprompter (1 item), Manfrotto 504HD Tripod (1 item), and Lyra Bi-Color 3200K-5600K Soft Panel 1 x 1 Studio & Field LED Light (5 items).
1.4 Platform
The MOOC is offered in the platform Selene Unicauca [7]. This platform was developed on Open edX. Regarding the MOOC audiovisual content, the videos are uploaded in YouTube servers [8]. Subsequently, the URLs of the videos are linked from the Selene platform. The content supported by Selene Unicauca is explained bellow.
1.4.1 Assessment activities
Several evaluation technologies are supported by Selene Unicauca. To build the MOOC, we considered the following assessment technologies [9]:
Checkbox: the user chooses one or more correct options from a list of possible answers
Multiple Choice: the user selects one answer from a set of possible answers
Numerical Input: the user employs numbers or mathematical expressions to answer a question
Text Input: the user inputs text into a response field as words, letters, and special characters
1.5 General description
This section presents the general description of the MOOC as the title, the lenght and the keywords.
1.6 Target learners
The MOOC is addressed to agricultural-sector people from Colombia. As minimum requirements, the learners must attend the high school or demonstrate a high school degree. Also, the learners must present skills in office software tools as Word, Calculator and a web browsers.
1.7 Pedagogical approaches
The research employed case-based learning as a pedagogical approach. The teachers presented definitions of agroclimatic monitoring related with real cases. For example, definitions of climate elements as temperature, humidity, precipitation, solar radiation and wind are explained from real cases presented in crops.
1.8 Objectives and competences
1.9 Learning content
This MOOC is composed by four work sections and each one will be presented for one week. Table 3 shows the learning content for this MOOC as sections, subsections, unit and format learning content.
Table 3 Learning content of the MOOC: agroclimatic tools for crop protection.
| Week | Section | Subsection | Unit | Format |
| 1 | Orientation | Orientation | How does Selene work? | Video tutorial |
| Course presentation | Video recorded in outdoor | |||
| 2 | Climate | Elements | Temperature | Videos recorded in television studio |
| Humidity | ||||
| Precipitation | ||||
| Solar radiation | ||||
| Wind | ||||
| Factors | Latitude and altitude | |||
| Topography | ||||
| Continental | ||||
| 3 | Agroclimatic monitoring | Agroclimatic concepts | Agroclimatic | |
| Macro-climate | ||||
| Meso-climate | ||||
| Microclimate | ||||
| Manual monitoring | Homemade thermometer | Videos recorded in outdoor locations | ||
| Homemade hygrometer | ||||
| Homemade pluviometer | ||||
| Homemade anemometer and wind vane | ||||
| Automated monitoring | Weather station | |||
| 4 | Technologies for agroclimatic monitoring | Understanding the Agroclimatic charts | Cartesian plane | Video recorded on slides |
| Line chart | ||||
| Line chart | ||||
| Agroclimatic monitoring from computer | AgroCloud | Video tutorials | ||
| AgroClima | ||||
| Agronet |
Source: own elaboration.
MOOC learning content was presented through videos recorded in outdoor locations (section: agroclimatic monitoring), a television studio (sections: orientation and climate) and video tutorials (section: technologies for agroclimatic monitoring).
Figure 1 (a) shows the video recorded in outdoor locations of the “Homemade hygrometer” unit by Ph.D. Apolinar Figueroa and David Camilo Corrales, and Figure 1 (b) shows the video recording of the “Homemade pluviometer” unit by Ph.D. Juan Carlos Corrales.
In addition, Figure 2 (a) depicts the video recorded in the television studio of the “Temperature” unit, and Figure 2 (b) shows the video recording of the “Agro Climate” unit. These videos were recorded by Ph. D. David Camilo Corrales.
The post-production video of the “Temperature” unit is available in the Youtube channel of the Mooc MenTES project in the following URL: https://youtu.be/G45LxOwIID0.
1.10 Assessment activities
We designed formative and summative activities to assess each MOOC section. As formative activity, we propose a learner’s presentation through a video selfie in the MOOC section “Orientation”. The remaining MOOC sections summative activities were designed based on multiple choice and checkbox test forms. Additionally, in the “Agroclimatic monitoring” MOOC section, we propose as a summary activity the peer assessment of videos recorded by the learners building homemade instruments for climate monitoring. Table 4 presents a summary of the MOOC assessment activities.
Table 4 Assessment activities of the MOOC: agroclimatic tools for crop protection.
| Week | Section | Assessment | Activity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Orientation | Formative | Learner’s presentation through a video selfie |
| 2 | Climate | Summative | Multiple choice form Checkbox form |
| 3 | Agroclimatic monitoring | Summative | Multiple choice form Checkbox form Peer assessment: video recording of the crafting of a homemade instrument for climate monitoring. |
| 4 | Technologies for agroclimatic monitoring | Summative | Text input forms |
Source: own elaboration
1.11 Complementary technologies
1.11.1 Learning content
For the MOOC section: “Technologies for agroclimatic monitoring” of the Learning Content, we used the next complementary agroclimatic platforms:
AgroCloud [10] http://www.agrocloudcolombia.com/
AgroClima [11] http://agroclima.cenicafe.org/
Agronet [12] http://www.agronet.gov.co/agroclima/Paginas/default.aspx
2. RESULTS
We proposed a survey to assess the MOOC learning videos. This survey contains 4 questions:
Do you understand the video? (scale: 1 lowest qualification and 5 highest qualification)
Do you understand the words used in the video? (scale: 1 lowest qualification and 5 highest qualification)
Is the video interesting? (scale: 1 lowest qualification and 4 highest qualification)
Would you like to watch other related videos? (scale: Yes, No, Perhaps)
In this section, we present the results of the survey for the video of the MOOC “Temperature” unit.
Thirteen people of rural areas located in Cauca (Colombia) filled the survey. Figure 3 presents the location (in percentages) of the respondents. 23.08 % of the surveyed people live to close to Popayán, while 30.77 % of the respondents live in Suárez and 15.38 % of the respondents are located in villages near to Sotará town. The remaining of the respondents live in towns as Timbio, Cajibío, Caldono and Santander de Quilichao (7.69 % each one).
On the other hand, the respondents are between 15 29 years old, and the average age is 22 years. Figure 4 shows the respondents age percentage distributed in three ranges. 23.08 % of the respondents are under 18 years, 61.54 % of the respondents are between 18 and 25 years, while 15.38 % are over 25 years.
The results obtained for question (a) indicate that 100 % of the respondents answered “5”. In other words, the surveyed people understood clearly the video content. However, for the question (b), 53.84 % of the respondents understood all the words used in the video, and 46.15 % of the respondents recognized the vast majority of words presented in the video. Concerning the question (c), 92.31 % of the surveyed people considered that the video was very interesting and 7.69 % of the respondents answered that the video content was normal. Finally, in the results of the question (d), 100 % of the respondents would like to watch other related videos.
3. RESULTS ANALYSIS
The good results obtained by the video of the MOOC “Temperature” unit occur due to the use of resources and didactic materials. These kind of tools have been quite successful at teaching other courses in general since they lead to meaningful teaching and learning [13]. In the sections “Orientation”, “Climate” and “Agroclimatic monitoring”, the production used instruments of presentation and transmission similar to elements used in the “Temperature” video. These included, amongst others: images, maps, photographs, sketches and diagrams. Dynamic and attractive visual material is frequently used to present between 40 % and 50 % of the courses content (via textbooks, video, etc.), it allows to be closer to students and the media they are accustomed to, such as television, computer games and mobile applications [14]. The challenge of the presented MOOC corresponds to evaluate the “Technologies for agroclimatic monitoring” section. It includes more theoretical and intangible elements, such as mathematical functions represented in a cartesian coordinate system once the students understand the concepts of previous MOOC sections.
The respondents insight of the “Temperature” video is available in the Youtube channel of the Mooc MenTES project at the URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucOdMyF2yHk.
4. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we proposed a MOOC titled “agroclimatic tools for crop protection” focused in agricultural-sector people with Spanish as their mother tongue. We show a first MOOC evaluation based on a survey applied to 13 people of rural areas located in Cauca (Colombia) for the video of the MOOC “Temperature” unit. Although the survey results present good qualifications, the respondents sample is very small and the evaluation of one MOOC video is not enough. In this sense, we propose as future works:
The design of an experimental formal evaluation based on popular approximations proposed by MOOC Research Initiative and the European MOOCs Stakeholder Summit [15] as an eLearning Course, by the process perspective or via the outcomes perspective.
The development of MOOC specialization programs to deepen the expertise in agroclimatic monitoring through a series of related courses as training in meteorological stations, climate data analysis and early warning systems for diseases and pest detection based on climate variables.
Once each MOOC section is successfully completed, the research proposes offering a verified certification for each course in the agroclimatic monitoring specialization.
Similar to Coursera Specializations, the research proposes the offering of a capstone project once completed and passed all Specialization MOOCs. This project allows the learners to demonstrate the knowledge acquired in the Specialization MOOCs.
