The popularity of online learning has boomed over the last few years, pushing instructors to consider the best ways to design their courses to support student learning needs and participation. Prior research suggests the need for instructor facilitation to provide this guidance and support, whereas other studies have suggested peer facilitation would be better because students might feel more comfortable learning and challenging each other. Our research compared these two facilitation methods and discovered that students participated more in instructor-facilitated online courses where they wrote more notes, edited and reread notes more, and created more connections to other notes than students in peer-facilitated online courses. We identified student activity patterns and described differences in how those patterns manifest themselves based on the facilitation method that was used. Our findings also show that instructorfacilitated online courses had a stronger sense of community than peer-facilitated online courses.

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Video lecture capture is rapidly being deploying in highereducation institutions as a means of increasing student learning, outreach, and experience. Understanding how learners use these systems and relating this use back to pedagogical and institutional goals is a hard issue that has largely been unexplored. This work describes a novel web-based lecture presentation system which contains fine-grained user tracking features. These features, along with student surveys, have been used to help analyse the behaviour of hundreds of students over an academic term, quantifying both the learning approaches of students and their perceptions on learning with lecture capture.

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Adding uncertainty information to visualizations is becoming increasingly common across domains since its addition helps ensure that informed decisions are made. This work has shown the difficulty that is inherent to representing uncertainty. Moreover, the representation of uncertainty has yet to be thoroughly explored in educational domains even though visualizations are often used in educational reporting. We analyzed 50 uncertainty-augmented visualizations from various disciplines to map out how uncertainty has been represented. We then analyzed 106 visualizations from educational reporting systems where the learner can see the visualization; these visualizations provide learners with information about several factors including their knowledge, performance, and abilities. This analysis mapped the design space that has been employed to communicate a learner's abilities, knowledge, and interests. It also revealed several opportunities for the inclusion of uncertainty information within visualizations of educational data. We describe how uncertainty information can be added to visualizations of educational data and illustrate these opportunities by augmenting several of the types of visualizations that are found in existing learning analytics reports. The definition of this design space, based on a survey of the literature, will enable the systematic exploration of how different design decisions affect learner trust, understanding, and decision making.

Fostering a strong sense of community among students within online courses is essential to supporting their learning experience. However, there is little consensus about how different facilitation methods influence students' sense of community or behaviors. This lack of understanding means instructors do not have the information they need to select an appropriate facilitation method when teaching online. This challenge is further complicated by a poor sense of how community building is influenced by the length of an online course. To better understand the relationship between these factors, we explored students' sense of community across four graduate-level online courses. Two of these courses employed an instructor-led form of facilitation and two employed a peer-led form of facilitation. For each facilitation method, one course lasted an entire term (12 weeks) and the other lasted half a term (6 weeks). This two-by-two betweensubjects design is augmented with interview data. This design enabled the study of both variables and possible interaction effects. The findings revealed students in instructor-facilitated courses experienced a stronger sense of community. Longer courses were also associated with a stronger sense of community, although the relationship was weaker than that of facilitation. No interaction effects were detected between facilitation method and course length. Follow-up analyses examined the relationship between facilitation style, course length, and a set of twelve student behaviors (e.g., note writing, note reading, and replying). The results revealed that both facilitation style and course length were associated with differences in students' note attributes including note length, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the text, and the frequency of their replies. Collectively, these findings offer evidence that both facilitation style and course length are related to students' sense of community and the behaviors they exhibit online.

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Purpose The purpose of this study was to provide a new characterization of the extent to which learners complete learning activities in massive open online courses (MOOCs), a central challenge in these contexts. Prior explorations of learner interactions with MOOC materials have often described these interactions through stereotypes, which accounts for neither the full spectrum of potential learner activities nor the ways those patterns differ across course designs. Design/methodology/approach To overcome these shortcomings, the authors apply confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis to learner activities within three MOOCs to test different models of participation across courses and populations found within those courses. Findings Courses varied in the extent to which participation was driven by learning activities vs time/topic or a mixture of both, but this was stable across offerings of the same course. Research limitations/implications The results call for a reconceptualization of how different learning activities within a MOOC are designed to work together, to better allow strong learning outcomes even within one activity form or more strongly encourage participation across activities. Originality/value The authors validate new continuous-patterns rather than a discrete-pattern participation model for MOOC learning.