Organization of non-formal education for future physical education teachers

Abstract

The organization of massive open online courses on the Coursera platform to enhance academic competence of future physical education teachers is the subject of this study. In the work massive open online courses are presented as a resource for students’ non-formal education. The goal of the study is to identify the effectiveness of massive open online courses in increasing students’ academic performance and developing academic competence. The authors used the following theoretical and empirical methods: literature review and analysis, content analysis of non-formal education courses and pedagogical experiment. Mathematical statistics methods as SPSS Statistics 27.0 program and the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U-test to compare the control and experimental groups were utilized in this research. 70 students of 3-4 years of study of the educational program “Physical Education and Sport” of Pavlodar Pedagogical University named after Alkey Margulan took part in the pedagogical experiment. Empirical data were collected based on the results of organizing 5 massive open online courses for students. As a result of the study, the authors found out that the presented courses increased the academic performance of the experimental group by 11.4%. This fact allows future physical education teachers to apply the acquired skills to develop their academic competence.