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

Abstract

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.

Attitudes towards Online Learning: What Do Brazilian Students Think About?

“…In other words, the promotion of the advantages of virtual tools usage should take into account what is the students' interest because their attitudes towards online learning may differ. For example, if the students opted for online course as the only opportunity they believed to have, benefits such as the elimination of temporal and geografical barriers, as mentioned by Beldarrain (2006), Sanchez and Hueros (2010), Ribas et al (2011), Joo et al (2013), Hew et al (2018) and Sivo et al (2018), might be more suitable to be focused on. Otherwise, if the reason was to seek for improvement of professional qualification, the potencial to acquire expertise and problem-solving skills required in the workplace presented by Beldarrain (2006) could be more appropriate.…”

Gamification of MOOCs Adopting Social Presence and Sense of Community to Increase User’s Engagement: An Experimental Study

“…Engagement is a popular topic in the literature on MOOCs. Authors have described the construct via literature review [19], through theoretical frameworks, such as selfdetermination theory [20], learning analytics [21], and machine learning algorithms [22]. The studies conducted have identified, among other results, the type of users that engage in MOOCs [4].…”

Learning Innovations of Massive Open Online Courses Integrated Hybrid Learning as an Acceleration to Increasing Professional Capability of Prospective Vocational Teachers in the Industrial Revolution 4.0

“…The point is that MOOCs have an unlimited scale. The number of MOOCs participants can reach hundreds of thousands of people for each lecture (Bozkurt, Akgün-Özbek, and Zawacki-Richter, 2017;Zancanaro, Nunes and Domingues, 2017;Hew, Qiao and Tang, 2018;Huisman et al, 2018). This is because technically there are no obstacles that can limit the number of participants.…”

“…One form of learning innovation that is currently popular is the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). MOOCs is a system and learning media consisting of online course services with various features and content (Lambert and Alony, 2015;Bozkurt, Akgün-Özbek and Zawacki-Richter, 2017;Hew, Qiao and Tang, 2018;Garrido et al, 2019). Until now, MOOCs are still an effective learning media in developing the level of independence and capability of students, especially prospective vocational students.…”