Video and course content discussion on Massive Open Online Courses: An exploratory research

Abstract

-This paper deals with the ways in whichMassive Open Online Courses (MOOC) participants use course related forums and the contribution of those forums to the learning experience of their virtual students. We focused on the comparison between, on one hand, video content provided by the course organizers and on the other hand, the content provided by user discussions in the forums. Our methodology frame is based on natural sociological inquiry. Video Lectures, as well as the most active forum threads and their posts were collected during a 6 weeks long xMOOC that took place in fall 2013 on a well-known MOOC platform. Content analysis was performed and the study concludes that the forum included a very high level of interactions involving mostly course related exchange of information amongst students, placing this course at the intersection between a constructivist MOOC (cMOOC) and a classical information transmission based MOOC (xMOOC).

The Forum Community, the Connectivist Element of an xMOOC

“…The top contributor wrote 3.3% of the selected posts, and the next in the ranking contributed for 1.6% only (representing 4.9% for the top two contributors). These results are very close to our previous research [56] in which the top 2 contributors were the authors of 5% of all posts and the top 10 contributors authored 7.7%. These numbers are much lower than those from another study that observed that the top 5 contributors were accountable for 43% of posts for one forum, and of 21% of posts for another forum [30] (vs. 8.3% in this research).…”

“…mMOOCs combine characteristics of both xMOOCs and cMOOCs by providing video lectures given by instructors, accompanied by information exchange and knowledge co-creation through forums led by the participants. This fits Dubosson et al's [56] definition of mMOOC as 'Massive Open Online Courses, which include a mix of formal lectures, passing information in the classic form, and of connectivist exchanges among course participants, with limited course staff intervention, i.e. when less than 10% of all posts are due to staff'.…”

“…Having the staff not contributing substantially could be an advantage, as student participation may increase when discussions are not led by the instructors [28,29]. In a previous study analysing another MOOC [56], we observed comparable proportions, with teaching assistants and instructors contributing 2.04% of all posts. Looking at the top posters (see Table 1, above), we observed that the top 10 posters contributed altogether 287 posts in the selected threads, corresponding to 12.9 % of the analysed posts.…”

“…Once the data were collected, they were read, coded and interpreted. Firstly, a list of codes related to peer interaction was constructed based on a former exploratory study concerning MOOCs [56]. A preliminary analysis of 400 posts was then performed, to refine these codes.…”

Los MOOC en la línea del tiempo: una biografía investigativa de una tendencia educativa

“…Por otra parte, otros estudios como Bali et al (2015), Dubosson et al (2015), Blanco et al (2013), Mahajan et al (2019), Smith & Eng (2013 se enfocan en las distinciones de varios tipos de MOOC, de acuerdo al tipo de experiencia de aprendizaje que resulta de sus distintos tipos de diseño instruccional, entre los que se resaltan los xMOOC, cMOOC, los microMOOC, etc.…”