Quality as perceived by learners is it the dark side of the MOOCs?

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have been considered a springboard for Higher Education change, due to the revolution they encompassed for key, macrolevel dimensions of change as accessibility, openness, universities’ business/organizational models tightly connected to very successful research and business activities. However, the attention moved quickly to the other side of the MOOCs: the learners’ perspective on MOOCs, as micro-level dimensions that could bring new light on the impact of the model. In line with this, within the eLearning quality debate the perception of learners should be taken into account. In this paper our aim is to introduce two diverse learners (from their cultural and eLearning experiences point of view) perspectives along their experiences within two different MOOCs. The learners wrote their lived experience according to the principles of phenomenology, collecting their impressions, feelings and thoughts about participation to the MOOCs. The memos collected were analyzed taking into account the expressions regarding the perceived quality of the experience at a micro-level. Furthermore, quality was defined adopting the Sloan C framework; within this framework, the parameters of analysis of the Community of Inquiry model were applied to the learners’ discourse. The final goal was to achieve a complete picture of different perspectives expressing how quality can be experienced by MOOC’s learners, showing the critical issues that require further intervention from practices and approaches at the micro-level to improve a multiperspective quality of MOOCs.