Demographic differences in how students navigate through MOOCs

Abstract

The current generation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) attract a diverse student audience from all age groups and over 196 countries around the world. Researchers, educators, and the general public have recently become interested in how the learning experience in MOOCs differs from that in traditional courses. A major component of the learning experience is how students navigate through course content.This paper presents an empirical study of how students navigate through MOOCs, and is, to our knowledge, the first to investigate how navigation strategies differ by demographics such as age and country of origin. We performed data analysis on the activities of 140,546 students in four edX MOOCs and found that certificate earners skip on average 22% of the course content, that they frequently employ non-linear navigation by jumping backward to earlier lecture sequences, and that older students and those from countries with lower student-teacher ratios are more comprehensive and non-linear when navigating through the course.From these findings, we suggest design recommendations such as for MOOC platforms to develop more detailed forms of certification that incentivize students to deeply engage with the content rather than just doing the minimum necessary to earn a passing grade.

Types of Participant Behavior in a Massive Open Online Course

“…The most active participants, the Social Engagers, were the oldest participants on average and most of them achieved a certificate. These findings are consistent with the literature (Breslow et al, 2013;Guo & Reinecke, 2014;Ho et al, 2014;Huang, Dasgupta, Ghosh, Manning, & Sanders, 2014;Kizilcec et al, 2013;Onah et al, 2014). According to the social-constructivism approach, the social context and relationships with others are crucial to a process of negotiating meaning and developing new skills (Anders, 2015).…”

Does Taking a MOOC as a Complement for Remedial Courses Have an Effect on My Learning Outcomes? A Pilot Study on Calculus

“…This is obvious, for example, when observing the different hours of the day that the students access the online course in our pilot study. But previous work has reported that although most of the participants in a MOOC tend to follow a linear path through the course content, these paths can vary depending on characteristics such as the age or the country of origin [10]. In addition, differences were observed on the activity patterns in each of the courses.…”

MOOC Video Interaction Patterns: What Do They Tell Us?

“…Research on MOOC video interactions are usually centered on analyzing lecture-to-lecture navigation strategies [5], predicting dropout [6,15] and in-video dropouts [7]. Among these work, only [15,7] contain click-level video analysis.…”