Talkabout

Abstract

Massive online classes are global and diverse. How can we harness this diversity to improve engagement and learning? Currently, though enrollments are high, students' interactions with each other are minimal: most are alone together. This isolation is particularly disappointing given that a global community is a major draw of online classes. This paper illustrates the potential of leveraging geographic diversity in massive online classes. We connect students from around the world through small-group video discussions. Our peer discussion system, Talkabout, has connected over 5,000 students in fourteen online classes. Three studies with 2,670 students from two classes found that globally diverse discussions boost student performance and engagement: the more geographically diverse the discussion group, the better the students performed on later quizzes. Through this work, we challenge the view that online classes are useful only when in-person classes are unavailable. Instead, we demonstrate how diverse online classrooms can create benefits that are largely unavailable in a traditional classroom.

Exploring the relevance of single‐gender group formation: What we learn from a massive open online course (MOOC)

“…Interestingly, within gender unequal regions, we noticed a difference between men and women. This difference suggests varieties of views among people of the same region, which could also offer some clarifications to the mixed effects of participants’ culture (hinder communication, and exposure to different perspectives) found in the literature (Kulkarni et al ., ; Popov et al ., ). These findings indicate that single‐gender group perception is a factor that counts when using grouping as learning or teaching strategy in MOOCs and other learning environments.…”

“…Seven hundred and seventy (770) precourse surveys were collected. Due to the number of participants and in line with the literature on grouping in MOOCs (Kulkarni et al ., ; Lim et al ., ), a quantitative approach was used to analyze students’ preferences regarding their placement into groups. Moreover, our research questions sought to confirm our hypothesis and made quantitative analysis appropriate (Creswell, ).…”

“…Nevertheless, MOOC researchers found persistence and performance differences among participants from different regions and cultural backgrounds (Kizilcec & Halawa, ). Kulkarni et al ., () research denoted that geographically diverse groups in MOOCs were beneficial because they exposed students to others and to other ways of thinking. Nevertheless, culture effect on groups is often analyzed through Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov () cultural dimensions and an extensive discussion of culture is found in CSCL studies.…”

Social Help-seeking Strategies in a Programming MOOC

“…Participation can be altered through changing the forum interface and mechanics; one can, for example, use a reputation system [4]. Similarly, researchers have suggested approaches for structuring the discussions differently, for example by using computer-mediated small group discussions in a free-form [3,20] or in a goal-oriented manner [5,22].…”

“…Students' learning can increase when such social interventions are used [5,20], and furthermore, social learning tools can improve the MOOC experience [5,27]. This said, a common challenge with creating social learning activities is their orchestration [5,20]: the participants are not present all the time, and developing the critical mass needed to ensure the functionality of social interactions can be challenging.…”