Analysis items to assess the quality of open online courses for higher education

The quality of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is an important topic to be addressed by different stakeholders: higher education institutions, MOOC providers, education companies, educational providers. National and international agencies are or will be deeply involved in preparing or attending common guidelines in order to fulfill quality of MOOCs. Some indicators that can help in analyzing quality are provided by the learner point of view, by pedagogy, by instructional design, by outcome measures. The latter has been the most widely adopted, since numerical data help in comparison between different platform or different educational experiences. But these data, such as completion and retention rates, were criticized when used to assess quality of MOOCs. In the literature, there are some checklists and framework that can help and guide the expert or novice designer in the process of MOOC developments. In the present work, we are going to address the experience of the start@unito project, an online platform developed at the University of Torino which offers 50 open online courses in order to facilitate the transition between secondary and tertiary education, making the students anticipate their career by attending a complete university module online prior to enrolment at the university. This could lead to an improvement in the number of ECTS credits acquired during the first year of university studies and to the drop-out rate. An analysis of the start@unito open online courses quality is provided according to the frameworks and checklists.