Bridging MOOCs, Smart Teaching, and AI: A Decade of Evolution Toward a Unified Pedagogy
This addresses the challenge of fragmented educational technologies for educators and institutions, though it is incremental in synthesizing existing paradigms.
This paper tackles the problem of isolated implementation of MOOCs, Smart Teaching, and AI in higher education by proposing a unified pedagogical framework that combines their strengths, with findings indicating potential to enhance learner engagement and enable personalized, scalable learning.
Over the past decade, higher education has evolved through three distinct paradigms: the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the integration of Smart Teaching technologies into classrooms, and the rise of AI-enhanced learning. Each paradigm is intended to address specific challenges in traditional education: MOOCs enable ubiquitous access to learning resources; Smart Teaching supports real-time interaction with data-driven insights; and generative AI offers personalized feedback and on-demand content generation. However, these paradigms are often implemented in isolation due to their disparate technological origins and policy-driven adoption. This paper examines the origins, strengths, and limitations of each paradigm, and advocates a unified pedagogical perspective that synthesizes their complementary affordances. We propose a three-layer instructional framework that combines the scalability of MOOCs, the responsiveness of Smart Teaching, and the adaptivity of AI. To demonstrate its feasibility, we present a curriculum design for a project-based course. The findings highlight the framework's potential to enhance learner engagement, support instructors, and enable personalized yet scalable learning.