An Approach to Using Existing Online Education Tools to Support Practical Education on MOOCs

MOOCs are popular for online education because of its convenience and excellent educational resources. At present, MOOCs just provide very limited online practical environments such as online tests, quizzes and online judge etc., but they have not provided students with some dynamic and operable online practical environments, such as interactive education tools etc. Online education tools can satisfy the needs of online practicing, mainly because of its abundance, interactivity and convenience, but MOOCs have not made full use of these online tools yet. The paper proposes an approach to using existing online education tools to support practical education on MOOCs by two enhancements: educational resources development and real-time collaborative learning. The key to the approach is operation reuse, which involves recording, optimizing and replaying user operations on existing online educations tools. Based on the approach, we develop an education platform called Smart Web Tutor. Case study is performed to analyze user experience, and the results show that our approach contributes to students' learning, especially for real-time collaborative learning. Also, some suggestions from students are inspiring to further increase the utility and user experience of our approach and education platform.