Non-formal Education on the Coursera Platform: a Regional University Experience

This article provides a discussion of the usage of massive open online courses on the Coursera platform as a resource for non-formal education in Kazakhstan. The authors of this research define non-formal education as one of the strategies for students’ personal and professional development. The article aims to evaluate the efficacy of massive open online courses in improving the language level of language majors studying. The usage of a variety of methods including theoretical and comparative analysis, pedagogical experiment, testing and content analysis are described to illustrate the findings collected during the study process. The methods of mathematical statistics, such as the non-parametric statistical criterion Mann-Whitney U-test and SPSS Statistics 27.0 program were utilized in this research. 68 3rd year students of the educational program “Foreign Language: Two Foreign Languages” of Pavlodar Pedagogical University named after Alkey Margulan took part in the pedagogical experiment. Data were collected from 4 massive open online courses on the Coursera platform: “Work Smarter, Not Harder: Time Management for Personal & Professional Productivity”, “Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)”, “Project Management: The Basics for Success” and “Leading teams: Building Effective Team Cultures”. The empirical study and the conclusions demonstrated that massive open online courses on the Coursera platform increase the level of language proficiency by 23.6%, allowing students to realize their goals outside the university, and also develop their metacognitive abilities.