Engaging with massive online courses

Abstract

The Web has enabled one of the most visible recent developments in education-the deployment of massive open online courses. With their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning. Despite this early promise, however, MOOCs are still relatively unexplored and poorly understood.In a MOOC, each student's complete interaction with the course materials takes place on the Web, thus providing a record of learner activity of unprecedented scale and resolution. In this work, we use such trace data to develop a conceptual framework for understanding how users currently engage with MOOCs. We develop a taxonomy of individual behavior, examine the different behavioral patterns of high-and low-achieving students, and investigate how forum participation relates to other parts of the course.We also report on a large-scale deployment of badges as incentives for engagement in a MOOC, including randomized experiments in which the presentation of badges was varied across subpopulations. We find that making badges more salient produced increases in forum engagement.

The Forum Community, the Connectivist Element of an xMOOC

“…Some studies observed that more peer interactions generate higher academic performance [37,38]. On the contrary, another study concluded that students with higher grades tend to read less of the forum content than those with lower grades [35]. The same study also showed that students who handed in the lowest number of assignments used the forum to find study partners and used non-English words.…”

“…Threads cover very different topics such as course content, questions and their answers, and organisational issues [35]. But this huge diversity may cause some trouble for participants.…”

Exploring Students’ Engagement Patterns in SPOC Forums and their Association with Course Performance

“…In their study, the number of words in posts were considered as an index of the effort invested by students and found to be positively related with final marks. Anderson, Huttenlocher, Kleinberg, and Leskovec (2014) characterized students' engagement by connecting their assignment submissions to the discourse content within their postings, and they found that, the number of terms involving course terminology in forums was significantly correlated with the times of assignments' submissions. Liu et al (2018) categorized the postings into interactive, registering, questioning, viewpoint, thematic and quoting behaviors.…”

Hogyan alakul (hat) a tanulói aktivitás egy MOOC során?

“…A MOOC egy folyamat fontos állomása, amelyet megelőzték a különböző távoktatási formák és technológiák, azonban a MOOC típusú kurzusokat letisztult és célirányosan fejlesztett platform, integrált funkciók, sok visszacsatolás és a tanulók tevékenységének részletes követése jellemzi. Mivel a tanulók összes interakciója a kurzus tartalmával a weben kap helyet, így a tanulók tevékenységének rögzítése soha nem látott mértékben és részletességgel valósulhat meg (Anderson et al 2014).…”