A Study On Perception And Awareness Towards MOOCs Among The Pre-service Teachers

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a recent but hugely popular phenomenon in the online learning world. They are hailed by many as a solution for the developing world's lack of access to education because MOOCs can provide learning opportunities to a massive number of learners from anywhere in the world as long as they can access the course through Internet. It reaches a global domain of learners and on the other hand promulgates knowledge in an efficient digital platform, besides intertwining a huge network of scientists, professors, teachers, scholars, students and different stakeholders related to education system. The present study is conducted to assess the perception and awareness towards MOOCs among the pre-service teachers by taking 42 samples from Paschim Medinipur district in West Bengal. A well designed questionnaire has been used to collect the primary data; which was developed by Sruti Sruba Bharali. The result revealed that perception and awareness towards MOOCs is little higher among the male category students than the female counterpart. It has also been observed that perception and awareness towards MOOCs is little higher among the students from urban area than the rural counterpart. By using Inferential statistics (t-test); it was found that; these results were not statistically significant. Hopefully these will be helpful to the students, researchers, educationist, policy makers, government, schools, colleges and universities to successfully implement MOOCs in present education system.