Talkabout: Making Distance Matter with Small Groups in Massive Classes

Kulkarni, Chinmay; Cambre, Julia; Kotturi, Yasmine; Bernstein, Michael S.; Klemmer, Scott R.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-19641-1_6

Cited by 36 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, studies addressing participants' demographics and reasons for enrolling in MOOCs integrating group work are rare. Understanding that MOOCs are "here to stay" (Cooper & Sahami, 2013), that group work positively affects performance and engagement in MOOCs (Kulkarni, Cambre, Kotturi, Bernstein & Klemmer, 2016), and that MOOC learners are inclined to collaboration (Li et al, 2014), this paper purposes to describe the characteristics of MOOC learners assigned to group work. Thus, identifying characteristics of learners engaged in group work, and their motivations for taking the course can add to the literature on group work in MOOCs and can also give insights into how to enhance learning experiences and meet the learning needs of MOOC students working in groups.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploratory study of MOOC learners’ demographics and motivation: The case of students involved in groups

Bayeck

2016

Open Praxis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reports preliminary findings on students enrolled in a massive open online course, who were also assigned to work in groups. Part of a larger study on the effect of groups on retention and completion in MOOCs, the paper provides students' demographics (i.e., location, gender, education level, and employment status), and motivation for taking the course. Findings show that women outnumbered men and that students mostly enrolled into the course because of a friend. Indeed, research on MOOCs demonstrates that men outnumber women and that educational pursuit and professional development are the main motivators for taking MOOCs. Yet, this paper shows that when group work is included in a MOOC, women participate more. Furthermore, for students assigned to groups in a MOOC, friends are the principal incentive for enrolling into the course. These results are discussed in light of previous research, and implications for teaching and learning in online environments addressed.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploratory study of MOOC learners’ demographics and motivation: The case of students involved in groups

Bayeck

2016

Open Praxis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Students join a discussion timeslot based on their availability, and upon arriving to the discussion, are placed in a discussion group; on average there are four countries represented per discussion group. We have seen that students in discussions with peers from diverse regions outperformed students in discussions with more homogenous peers, in terms of retention and exam score [22]. We hypothesize that geographically diverse discussions catalyze more active thinking and reflection.…”

Section: How Students Use Two Peer Learning Platformsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…The physical and social configurations of in-person schools (especially residential ones) offer many opportunities for social encouragement [11,22]. For example, during finals week, everyone else is studying too.…”

Section: Three Impediments To Adoption… and Remediesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Structure and messaging techniques for online peer learning systems that increase stickiness

Kotturi

Kulkarni

Bernstein

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When students work with peers, they learn more actively, build richer knowledge structures, and connect material to their lives. However, not every peer learning experience online sees successful adoption. This paper articulates and addresses three adoption challenges for global-scale peer learning. First, peer interactions struggle to bootstrap critical mass. However, class incentives can signal importance and spur initial usage. Second, online classes have limited peer visibility and awareness, so students often feel alone even when surrounded by peers. We find that highlighting interdependence and strengthening norms can mitigate this issue. Third, teachers can readily access "big" aggregate data but not "thick" contextual data that helps build intuitions, so software should guide teachers' scaffolding of peer interactions. We illustrate these challenges through studying 8,500 students' usage of two peer learning platforms, Talkabout and PeerStudio. This paper measures efficacy through sign-up and participation rates and the structure and duration of student interactions.

show abstract

“…As such, peer instruction [13] and peer assessment [18] have not only been integrated into many classroom activities, but have also formed the basis of several online systems for peer-learning. For example, Talkabout organizes students into discussion groups based on characteristics such as gender or geographic balance [11]. HelpMeOut assists programmers debugging errors by suggesting solutions that peers have applied in the past [8].…”

Section: Reflection and Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learnersourcing Personalized Hints

Glassman

Lin

Cai

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work &Amp; Social Computing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Personalized support for students is a costly gold standard in education, but it scales poorly with the number of students. Prior work on learnersourcing presented an approach for learners to engage in human computation tasks while trying to learn a new skill. Our key insight is that students, through their own experience struggling with a particular problem, can become experts on the particular optimizations they implement or bugs they resolve. These students can then generate hints for fellow students based on their new expertise. We present workflows that harvest and organize students' collective knowledge and advice for helping fellow novices through design problems in engineering. Systems embodying each workflow were evaluated in the context of a college-level computer architecture class with an enrollment of more than two hundred students each semester. We show that, given our design choices, students can create helpful hints for their peers that augment or even replace teachers' personalized assistance.

show abstract

Talkabout: Making Distance Matter with Small Groups in Massive Classes

Cited by 36 publications

References 40 publications

Exploratory study of MOOC learners’ demographics and motivation: The case of students involved in groups

Exploratory study of MOOC learners’ demographics and motivation: The case of students involved in groups

Structure and messaging techniques for online peer learning systems that increase stickiness

Learnersourcing Personalized Hints

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About