SOONER

Funded via a grant of the Dutch Ministry of Education and the national coordination unit for educational sciences, September 2015 – August 2020), Budget: 1,35 Mio EUR (1.03 Mio acquired for own institution, Role: coordinator), http://www.sooner.nu

The SOONER project focused on fundamental and accompagnying research about open online education (OOE) in the Netherlands. Open online education is viewed as a strategic activity of an educational institution with systemic implications for the organization. Based on proven approaches for program evaluations from the health sciences, the project will enable systematic and long-term research on open online education from a macro-, meso- and micro-perspective. In addition, this project combines fundamental and accompanying research. SOONER will be organized via three PhD-projects on 1) self-regulated learning skill acquisition in the context of OOE, 2) motivation and intentions as key to drop-out in OOE and last but not least 3) scalable support solutions for OOE including learning analytics. These projects will be framed by a Post-Doc project that focuses on the structural and organizational embedding of OOE.

All projects will start from standardized measurement instruments or will adapt those for the specific context of OOE. All projects will access several sources for their data collection: MOOCs offered by the partner institutions, open courses offered by the OpenupEd partners, courses offered by the SURF projects and institutions participating in the SURF projects. The SOONER project is connected to the MOOCKnowledge project, a European cross-provider standardized survey about MOOCs and the SCORE2020 project, a European project focusing on support needs of educational institutions for OOE. Data from these European projects will be compared to Dutch OOE initiatives and benchmarking options will be explored. All results of the project will be shared via open licenses.