Abstract:Most studies on traditional asynchronous online discussion suggest that facilitating dialogue, that is, commenting forum activities, result in better learning and performance. However, due to open entry and diverse learner backgrounds, learner behaviour in massive open online courses (MOOCs) may be different. Viewing forum messages, which involves fewer mental and physical actions as well as less cognitive processing, rather than posting forum massages, might better match the learner's study purpose. In this s… Show more
“…In conventional online courses, learners usually share the same academic goals, are familiar with one another, and are supervised closely by the teacher (Chiu & Hew, 2018). However in MOOCs, learners do not know most of their peers, are not supervised by the teacher, and are under no expectation to complete the course (Chiu & Hew, 2018).…”
Section: Figure 1 Growth Of Moocs As Presented Bymentioning
Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) have attracted much worldwide attention, scholars still understand little about the specific elements that students find engaging in these large open courses. This study offers a new original contribution by using a machine learning classifier to analyze 24,612 reflective sentences posted by 5,884 students, who participated in one or more of 18 highly rated MOOCs. Highly rated MOOCs were sampled because they exemplify good practices or teaching strategies. We selected highly rated MOOCs from Coursetalk, an open user-driven aggregator and discovery website that allows students to search and review various MOOCs. We defined a highly rated MOOC as a free online course that received an overall five-star course quality rating, and received at least 50 reviews from different learners within a specific subject area. We described six specific themes found across the entire data corpus: (a) structure and pace, (b) video, (c) instructor, (d) content and resources, (e) interaction and support, and (f) assignment and assessment. The findings of this study provide valuable insight into factors that students find engaging in large-scale open online courses.
“…In conventional online courses, learners usually share the same academic goals, are familiar with one another, and are supervised closely by the teacher (Chiu & Hew, 2018). However in MOOCs, learners do not know most of their peers, are not supervised by the teacher, and are under no expectation to complete the course (Chiu & Hew, 2018).…”
Section: Figure 1 Growth Of Moocs As Presented Bymentioning
Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) have attracted much worldwide attention, scholars still understand little about the specific elements that students find engaging in these large open courses. This study offers a new original contribution by using a machine learning classifier to analyze 24,612 reflective sentences posted by 5,884 students, who participated in one or more of 18 highly rated MOOCs. Highly rated MOOCs were sampled because they exemplify good practices or teaching strategies. We selected highly rated MOOCs from Coursetalk, an open user-driven aggregator and discovery website that allows students to search and review various MOOCs. We defined a highly rated MOOC as a free online course that received an overall five-star course quality rating, and received at least 50 reviews from different learners within a specific subject area. We described six specific themes found across the entire data corpus: (a) structure and pace, (b) video, (c) instructor, (d) content and resources, (e) interaction and support, and (f) assignment and assessment. The findings of this study provide valuable insight into factors that students find engaging in large-scale open online courses.
“…Forum discussion is one of the main features and activities within MOOC structure apart from content delivery, assessment and evaluation. The forum discussion activities described as viewing, voting and commenting [1]. Johnson [6] has explained in a general perspective on the challenges of the virtual learning environment, which is relatable to the MOOC current environment as listed below.…”
Section: A Research Backgroundmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Each learns within personal pace, then required completing the quiz, practical exercise and peerreviewed project. In general, learning activities in MOOC can be classified into two categories: receiving information (e.g., video lectures), and peers or instructors interaction (e.g., forum discussion) [1].…”
The massively open online course (MOOC) has become an increasingly popular alternative platform for education due to its open concept and free features. Due to its features that allow enrolment on a massive scale and participation across the globe, it presented new analytic challenges. The vast amount and variety of data generated pose challenges for the learning analytics community to analyse especially concerning peer presence and peer learning. Forum activity data offers the opportunity to assess the relationship between forum activities and user backgrounds with the learner's progression and retention rate. Furthermore, there are several challenges in implementing data visualization in real-world scenarios such as different task characterisation compared to the existing analytics, along with varied factors on the usability of visualization among the domain analysts. Despite many research on learning analytics, most of the approaches were data-driven and there were only a handful of studies that were focused on interactive visualization design to facilitate MOOC forum user activity assessment using real-world scenarios and educational theories-driven. Our design study aims to investigate and formulate a visual analytic design to facilitate enriched visual analysis towards assessing forum activity in Malaysian MOOC, particularly in pattern and relationship exploration on the user diverse background and activities with the learning performance. This paper presents our review on visual learning analytics and current MOOC practice in Malaysia, our design study methodology and proposed conceptual visual analytics design on visualizing forum activity data.
“…Wise and Cui (2018) found that students who contributed to forums had higher passing rates than those who did not, although among the learners who passed the course there were no differences in course grades between contributors and noncontributors to the forums. Chiu and Hew (2018) found that it was actually the viewing of the messages rather than posting contributions to the forums that increased quiz scores. Onah, Sinclair and Boyatt (2015) compared tutor supported and peer supported forums, and found higher completion rates among students who chose the tutor supported mode.…”
Two free fully online courses were offered by Peoples-uni on its Open Online Courses site, both as self-paced courses available any time and as courses run over four weeks with tutor-led discussions. We tested the hypothesis that there are no measurable differences in outcomes between the two delivery methods. Similar numbers attended both versions of each course; students came from multiple countries and backgrounds. Numbers of discussion forum posts were greater in tutor-led than self-paced courses. Measured outcomes of certificates of completion, quiz completion and marks gained were very similar and not statistically significantly different between the tutor-led and the self-paced versions of either course. In light of little discernible difference in outcome between self-paced learning compared with courses including tutor-led discussions, the utility of the time cost to tutors is in question. The findings may be relevant to others designing online courses, including MOOCs.
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