Who studies MOOCs? Interdisciplinarity in MOOC research and its changes over time

Abstract

The complexity of digital and online education is becoming increasingly evident in the context of research into networked learning/participation. Interdisciplinary research is often proposed as a way to address complex scientific problems and enable researchers to bring novel perspectives into a field other than their own. The degree to which research on Massive Open Online Courses suggest that empirical research on xMOOCs may be more interdisciplinary than research on cMOOCs. Greater interdisciplinarity in xMOOC research could reflect the burgeoning interest in the field, the general familiarity with the xMOOC pedagogical model, and the hype experienced by xMOOCs. Greater interdisciplinarity in the field may also provide researchers with rich opportunities to improve our understanding and practice of digital and online learning. (Pellmar & Eisenberg, 2000). KeywordsNevertheless, in their assessment of proposals submitted for funding under the MOOC research initiative (henceforth MRI), Gašević, Kovanović, Joksimović, and Siemens (2014) show that more than 50% of the authors in all phases of the MRI grants were from the field of education, even though a common perception in the field is that the MOOC phenomenon is "driven by computer scientists" (p. 166). Research into emerging forms of digital learning is likely to suffer if driven by education researchers alone or computer scientists alone. As Gašević and colleagues note, disparate involvement in MOOC research "could be a worrying sign of the fragmentation in the research community", and as such there is a need to "[increase] efforts towards enhancing interdisciplinarity" (p. 134).We have recently completed a systematic review of the empirical MOOC literature published between (Veletsianos & Shepherdson, 2015, and as a result of that study, we can use bibliometric data to investigate the extent to which interdisciplinarity is present in the published literature on MOOCs. Thus, in this paper, we combine our data with data from Gašević et al. (2014), and data used in a past systematic review of the literature (Liyanagunawardena, Adams, & Williams, 2013), to examine interdisciplinarity in the MOOC literature, and whether and how this has changed over time.To examine these issues, we review relevant literature and explain why this study is significant; describe the methods used to conduct this investigation; present the results; and conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of the findings. Who Studies Moocs? Interdisciplinarity in MOOC Research and its Changes over Time Veletsianos and ShepherdsonThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 3 Literature ReviewInterdisciplinary research is "any study or group of studies undertaken by scholars from two or more distinct scientific disciplines" (Aboelela et al., 2007, p. 341). The value of interdisciplinary research and collaboration rests in both the complexity of the problems societies are faced with (Pellmar & Eisenberg, 2000), and in the novel perspec...

A Contemporary Review of Research Methods Adopted to Understand Students’ and Instructors’ Use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

“…Later on, the review of 60 papers published from 2008 to 2014 identified nine research categories based on research aims of each article, and concluded that the field of MOOC studies heavily relied on theoretical research and was just beginning to identify appropriate research methods to deal with large cohorts of participants, huge amounts of data, and innovative approaches of learning [14]. More recently, the review of 183 articles published during the period 2013-2015 revealed that MOOC studies had become more interdisciplinary than research pieces published from 2008 to 2012 [15].…”

“…The existing review articles seem to suggest that research topics on MOOCs are diverse [12], [14], and the research trend is continually evolving [13]- [15]. Among many topics investigated by MOOC scholars, teaching and learning has received increasing scholarly attention [14], [16].…”

A Systematic Analysis and Synthesis of the Empirical MOOC Literature Published in 2013–2015

“…While the MOOC phenomenon has been subject to numerous interpretations in the mass media (Kovanović, Joksimović, Gašević, Siemens, & Hatala, 2015;Selwyn, Bulfin, & Pangrazio, 2015) and some analyses of the the state of the field have been published (e.g., Bayne & Ross, 2014;Ebben & Murphy, 2014), researchers currently lack a systematic synthesis of the empirical literature published on the topic. A collective research effort is required to fully understand the impact of MOOCs (Reich, 2015), and researchers will benefit from analyses and syntheses of the literature, especially because (a) the field has developed rapidly and sparked extensive conversations pertaining to education and educational technology, (b) meaningful research results appear to be sparse (Jona & Naidu, 2014), and (c) researchers studying MOOCs reside in diverse disciplines (Veletsianos & Shepherdson, 2015).…”

What Research Says About MOOCs – An Explorative Content Analysis

“…The 21 st century witnessed an educational paradigm shift, stemming from the widespread use of (Weller, 2014): It is suggested There have been some efforts in academia to understand and analyse the MOOC phenomenon; several papers have examined MOOC research in academic journals (Ebben & Murphy, 2014;Gasevic, Kovanovic, Joksimovic, & Siemens, 2014;Kennedy, 2014;Liyanagunawardena et al, 2013;Raffaghelli, Cucchiara, & Persico, 2015;Sa'don, Alias, & Ohshima, 2014;Sangrà, González-Sanmamed, & Anderson, 2015;Veletsianos & Shepherdson, 2015Bozkurt, Akgün-Özbek, & Zawacki-Richter, 2017). These papers examined aspects of MOOC research such as methodology, pedagogy, and theory.…”