Overview of papers on enhancement of European Higher Education as presented during the Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Rome, October 2016

MOOCs, one of the main innovations in digital education in recent years, are based on the idea of freely accessible open education. Big platforms (edX, Coursera, Udacity, OpenupEd…) have emerged offering courses organized by universities worldwide. Higher Education institutions compete to gain attention and prestige either by signing agreements with these platforms or by developing their own to deliver courses.
The University of Granada (Spain) set up its own platform, Abierta (https://abierta.ugr.es/), where a massive course about the Alhambra is delivered in Spanish and English to more than 7,000 registered users. This study examines the second edition of this MOOC (spring 2016) including a sample of 2,823 students.
Our analysis focuses on the anxiety experienced by the students towards this model of education, a factor that could affect the final acceptance of this educational approach. The results indicate that Millennials (adults ages 18-35 in 2016; n=2099) experience higher anxiety levels than Generation X (ages 36-51; n=391); a result that could be counterintuitive with the idea of “digital natives”. Men (n=1008) also experience higher
anxiety than women (n=1815). Finally, anxiety is negatively correlated with the technical support received during the course.

Keywords

anxiety · educational technology · MOOC · open education