Unlocking teachers’ potential: MOOCLS, a visualization tool for enhancing MOOC teaching

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are revolutionizing online education and have become a popular teaching platform. However, traditional MOOCs often overlook learners' individual needs and preferences when designing learning materials and activities, resulting in suboptimal learning experiences. To address this issue, this paper proposes an approach to identify learners' preferences for different learning styles by analyzing their traces in MOOC environments. The Felder–Silverman Learning Style Model is adopted as it is one of the most widely used models in technology-enhanced learning. This research focuses on developing a reliable predictive model that can accurately identify learning styles. Based on insights gained from our model implementation, we propose MOOCLS (MOOC Learning Styles), an intuitive visualization tool. MOOCLS can help teachers and instructional designers to gain significant insight into the diversity of learning styles within their MOOCs. This will allow them to design activities and content that better support the learning styles of their learners, which can lead to higher learning engagement, improved performance, and reduction in time to learn.