Remain or leave? Reflections on the pedagogical and informative value of a massive open online course on the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership

Abstract

While the British electorate was asked to vote on a simple-sounding question during the UK referendum on EU membership in June 2016, the issues at play were extremely complex. In order to help potential voters make sense of the debate, the authors ran a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the referendum in the weeks leading up to the vote. The core of the MOOC featured all the common characteristics of this type of course: weekly video lectures, quizzes, question and answer sessions, forums and personal journals which participants could use to share and reflect. To date, little research has been done on the potential for this course format to improve the public's understanding of, and engagement with, EU-related politics and policy issues. Consequently, this paper proposes some initial reflections on the opportunities and challenges presented by this MOOC for fostering broad public engagement with politics in the EU. By considering issues of format, attendance and attrition, participation and power dynamics, we identify the challenges for harnessing MOOCs as a pedagogical and communicative tool for counteracting the EU knowledge deficit.

Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Aston Centre for Europe
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Politics, History and International Relations
Additional Information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Funding: ESRC UK in a Changing Europe grant, 4030006113.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Brexit,EU referendum,MOOC,Online learning,Political Science and International Relations
Last Modified: 08 Jan 2024 08:38
Date Deposited: 09 Jan 2018 12:00
Full Text Link: https://www.jce ... rticle/view/851
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2017-12-15
Published Online Date: 2017-12-15
Accepted Date: 2017-12-15
Authors: Glencross, Andrew (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-8320-9181)
St. Denny, Emily

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