E-Teaching Strategies: massive versus customized methodologies

Stephen Beaumont, Argentina, ID LLCE2016-279;         When designing any educational process, we must analyze it and try to optimize it taking into account all the variables involved in this process: curriculum design, didactic transposition, the learning environment, evaluation methodologies, etc. In the particular case of e-learning pedagogical processes, there is one particular scenario which is not present (at least in equal dimensions) in classroom teaching processes. This is the possibility of including, within one particular course, an enormous number of participants which would be impossible even to imagine in a classroom teaching process. This is where the concept of “mass education” appears, and with it, the concept of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). These methodologies of “mass education” may seem very attractive because of the volume of students who can be trained, but are very sensitive to environmental design, which can determine the success or failure of the process. On the other hand, we can see the results of personalized methodologies, in which the main instructor or a coordinator or assistant interacts directly with each student and performs feedback on each of the work, inquiries or suggestions from them.

Keywords: Educational process, e-learning, mass education