Best practices to design a Massive Online Open Course

Abstract

This article compiles a series of recommendations or best practices to keep in mind to design and implement a Massive Online Open Course. The best practices cover the following aspects: instructional design, game mechanics to encourage the participants participation and skills development, collaborative activities, role of the facilitators and standard users, evaluation and certification of the acquired learning, user experience, and integration with other social networks. For the purpose of extracting the best practices, we designed an online assessment tool for massive online open courses and subjected it to a process of inter-rater assessment to conduct a content validation. Subsequently, it was applied to a sample of these courses.