Towards a Model of Engaging Online Students: Lessons from MOOCs and Four Policy Documents

Abstract

Abstract-The paper describes a model of engaging students in fully online or blended learning environments. To do this, I first discuss the notion of student engagement and how it relates to the Self-Determination Theory of motivation. Next, I reviewed a number of online learning policy guidelines from four professional councils around the world in order to elicit specific guidelines related to the design of online learning courses, and student engagement. Following that, I analyzed two most highly-rated MOOCs. I analyzed the structural features of the two MOOCs and the comments of both participants who completed the courses, and who partially completed or dropped out. Altogether, comments from 839 participants were examined. Finally, using these empirical data and the policy guidelines from the four professional organizations, I outline a rudimentary model of engaging students in online learning courses, based on six major instructional design elements.

Understanding Student Engagement in Large-Scale Open Online Courses: A Machine Learning Facilitated Analysis of Student’s Reflections in 18 Highly Rated MOOCs

“…Hew (2015) analyzed guidelines of improving the quality of online teaching and learning from four professional councils, as well as qualitatively analyzed 839 participants' comments of two highly rated MOOCs using the grounded approach. By synthesizing the policy guidelines and actual opinions of online learners, Hew (2015) Another grounded approach study analyzed 965 course participants' reviews on three top-rated MOOCs in the subjects of literature, arts and design, and programming language to find out what factors about the course engaged students, and contributed to their favorable consideration of the online learning experience (Hew, 2016). Five factors were listed: problem-centric learning, instructor accessibility and passion, active learning, peer interaction, and helpful course resources.…”

“…To train the machine learning algorithm, we first developed a coding scheme consisting of the following six themes based on previous grounded approach studies that specifically analyzed MOOC students' engagement using participant review comments (Hew, 2015;. These themes, which are not listed in order of importance or priority included: To fulfill the training purpose, an annotated "instructional" dataset is required to form the training materials, consisting of positive and negative cases, on which the automatic machine classifiers "learn" through adapting their model parameters to fit the dataset.…”

Videos as learning objects in MOOCs: A study of specialist and non‐specialist participants' video activity in MOOCs

“…As a conclusion, shorter videos with an instructor using talking‐head and drawing‐hand style instructions are recommended. Similarly, Hew () recommends bitesize videos of 5–17 minutes with relevant pictures and animations. Li, Kidziński, Jermann, and Dillenbourg () conclude that video interaction patterns in MOOCs differ significantly between students with higher and lower performance scores.…”

Wearable Technology in Education to Enhance Technical MOOCs

“…MOOC or Massive Open Online Course is one of the online learning platforms. Hew [2] highlighted that the main purpose of online learning courses nowadays is to provide flexibility to access and manage the learning process as preferred by its learners and at the same time can reduce the learning cost. MOOC is a tuition course taught over the Internet that allows anyone to attend the course, and most of the courses offered are for free [3].…”