MyMOOCSpace: A cloud‐based mobile system to support effective collaboration in higher education online courses

Abstract

In recent years, institutions of higher education have been using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as an alternative to enhance and innovate traditional classroom practices. One of the approaches to this type of innovation consists of using the platforms where MOOCs are hosted for the development of courses that are aligned to their oncampus curricular contents. They are known as Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs), which allow online access to knowledge for groups of students with a well-defined profile. The platforms where MOOCs (and SPOCs) are hosted have been designed to support large volumes of data and visits. However, these platforms present important limitations regarding the implementation of collaborative learning activities. To address this problem, this article presents MyMOOCSpace, a cloud-based mobile system aimed at supporting effective collaboration in MOOCs, by combining key aspects of collaboration from the research area of Computer Supported Collaborative learning (CSCL) with game-based dynamics. MyMOOCSpace has been tested in three quasi-experiments that were run in four Latin-American universities with a total of 68 participants. The objective was to assess its usability and its effect in enhancing collaboration among students in a SPOC. The results obtained on usability show that MyMOOCSpace is easy to use, and that participants felt pleased with while using it. Finally, it was observed that MyMOOCSpace managed to enhance interaction and collaboration among students.

Gamification in MOOCs: A review of the state of the art

“…Although there are some MOOC environments that are privately-hosted or do not exist, we noticed that Hasso Plattner openHPI (https://open.hpi.de/) was the most active player of employing gamification in MOOCs. There were some experiments that were done on open edX [31], MiriadaX [37], and mooc.House [44]. Table IV shows the reasons behind implementing and proposing gamification in MOOCs.…”

“…Another key issue that was observable in the reviewed studies is the complicated structure employing gamification. Studies where implementation environment involves mobile devices have brightly declared that connecting mobile devices and gamification approaches with the web MOOCs include deployment obstacles [31,51]. Additionally, shortage of testing environment as well as ineffective testing sample size were reported in [1,23], [20,32], respectively.…”

“Cuanto más practiques, mejor lo harás”: evaluación multi-informante en el contexto de un curso e-learning

“…En futuros proyectos está previsto favorecer la interacción de los alumnos de este curso elearning en sesiones presenciales con los alumnos de la modalidad presencial y a través de nuevas aplicaciones móviles como MyLearningMentor (Alario-Hoyos, Estévez-Ayres, Pérez-Sanagustín, Leony y Kloos, 2015) y MyMOOCSpace (Ramírez-Donoso et al, 2015;Ramírez-Donoso et al, 2017). Nuevas formas de evaluación de los aprendizajes prácticos a través de los entornos virtuales deben explorarse para su incorporación próximamente.…”

The Exploration of the Mixed-Mode Teaching Based on the qMOOC+SPOCq

“…Through the SPOC platform, students can discuss with each other; mutual evaluation results, teachers can view each student's learning progress, online communication with students, targeted personalized counseling; the common problems, to focus on in the classroom. Through the practice of MOOC+SPOC teaching model, we found that before the class to watch the MOOC video teaching is very important [14], the classroom for students to quickly understand and accept new knowledge, can speak some teaching cases in teaching this class, students have more opportunities to practice, improve practical ability.…”