Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have a great potential for sustainable education. Millions of learners annually enrol on MOOCs designed to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse and international student population. Participants’ backgrounds vary by factors including age, education, location, and first language. MOOC authors address consequent needs by ensuring courses are well-organised. Learning is structured into discrete steps, prioritising clear communication; video components incorporate subtitles. Variability in participants’ language abilities inevitably create barriers to learning, a problem most extreme for those studying in a language which is not their first. This paper investigates how to identify ESL participants and how best to predict factors associated with their course completion. This study proposes a novel method for automatically categorising (English as Primary and Official Language; English as Official but not Primary Language; and English as a second Language groups) 25,598 participants studying FutureLearn “Understanding Language: Learning and Teaching” MOOC using natural language processing. We compared algorithms’ performance when extracting discernible features in participants’ engagement. Engagement in discussions at the end of the first week is one of the strongest predictive features, while overall, learner behaviours in the first two weeks were identified as the most strongly predictive feature.
Abstract. In this study, we aim to analyse English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a First Language (EFL) MOOC participants' engagements in a MOOC. We aim to find out key points which directly effect learners' dropout and performance in MOOCs. We worked on a FutureLearn data which is provided by the University of Southampton. The course is Understanding Language: Learning and Teaching MOOC that was run between 2016-04-04 and 2016-05-02 is chosen for the analysis. According to the results, it is very challenging to identify who is a second language English speaker by using their location information. One of the important findings is that first language English speakers wrote longer comments. In order to identify strategies for ESL MOOC participants, which is one of the ultimate goal of our research, there is a need for much deeper analyses.
Abstract-Massive Open Online Courses have been widely used all over the world in recent years in entirely online learning context or as blended learning on campus. Most of these courses are offered in English. A high percentage of the users, however, are speaking English as a second language. Some of the authors of this paper who either used MOOCs for blended learning or a research subject are English as a second language speakers as well. They have observed whilst teaching students at university during blended teaching using MOOCs that the students struggle in courses offered in English. This has motivated us to explore this issue in MOOCs to contribute to the pedagogy of MOOCs. The main question that we consider is how can these platforms give a better experience to second language English speakers. There are many sub-problems of this big research question. In this paper we would like to briefly present our initial findings and give an overview of the research on this area.
During the mass curfews, travel bans, school shutdowns, face-to-face education was discontinued, and many universities had to urgently switch to online education. Academics, most of whom are not familiar with digital pedagogy, had to adapt their lectures to online learning. The aim of this study is to analyze how Open Educational Resources (OERs) are used in practice during emergency remote teaching (ERT) and whether this influences the regular practice of academics on a global level and in Turkey in the longer term. Methodologically, we adopt a mixed-methods approach in two stages: (i) an empirical study conducted in Turkey to find out what prior knowledge and experience academics have with OERs and how they use OERs during ERT; (ii) a complimentary desk study on the global situation of OER use. Our results show that academics who did not know about OERs before the pandemic are still hesitant to use them, even though they have prior experience with online teaching. In addition, academics with higher rank and academics in architecture, philology, and arts have the most negative opinion about campus education being fully accessible online.
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