Developing future teachers’ digital competence via massive open online courses (MOOCs)

Abstract

This empirical study was conducted to develop third-year students’ digital competence at Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University, Kazakhstan and test the effectiveness of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to increase digital competence. Future teachers’ digital competence was regarded as a combination of knowledge, skills, abilities, strategies acquired in their learning experience and improvement in integrated activities using digital and network technologies to solve professional issues. The relevance of developing future teachers’ digital competence was associated with their insufficient knowledge and skills, which was reflected during the diagnostic stage analysis in using digital and network technologies in the educational process. Many approaches and tools have been adopted to develop future teachers’ digital competence and one of them is MOOCs. In this study, mixed methods were used, for example, theoretical analysis of pertinent literature, generalization, systematization, specification of conclusions and statistical analysis of the pedagogical experiment. The primary data were collected through the researchers’ pre- and post-experiment questionnaires. The findings of this study confirm that MOOCs as a distance learning technology have positively affected all participants and effectively improved future teachers’ digital competence depending on four components (motivational, technological, cognitive, and ethical) and the indicators of future teachers’ digital competence presented.