Personalisation in MOOCs: a critical literature review

The advent and rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have brought many issues to the area of educational technology. Researchers in the field have been addressing these issues such as pedagogical quality of MOOCs, high attrition rates, and sustainability of MOOCs. However, MOOCs personalisation has not been subject of the wide discussions around MOOCs. This paper presents a critical literature survey and analysis of the available literature on personalisation in MOOCs to identify the needs, the current states and efforts to personalise learning in MOOCs. The findings illustrate that there is a growing attention to personalisation to improve learners’ individual learning experiences in MOOCs. In order to implement personalised services, personalised learning path, personalised assessment and feedback, personalised forum thread and recommendation service for related learning materials or learning tasks are commonly applied

Understanding Communication Patterns in MOOCs: Combining Data Mining and qualitative methods

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer unprecedented opportunities to learn at scale. Within a few years, the phenomenon of crowd-based learning has gained enormous popularity with millions of learners across the globe participating in courses ranging from Popular Music to Astrophysics. They have captured the imaginations of many, attracting significant media attention - with The New York Times naming 2012 "The Year of the MOOC." For those engaged in learning analytics and educational data mining, MOOCs have provided an exciting opportunity to develop innovative methodologies that harness big data in education.Comment: Preprint of a chapter to appear in "Data Mining and Learning Analytics: Applications in Educational Research

Supportive technologies for group discussion in MOOCs

A key hurdle that prevents MOOCs from reaching their transformative potential in terms of making valuable learning experiences available to the masses is providing support for students to make use of the resources they can provide for each other. This paper lays the foundation for meeting this challenge by beginning with a case study and computational modeling of social interaction data. The analysis yields new knowledge that informs design and development of novel, real-time support for building healthy learning communities that foster a high level of engagement and learning. We conclude by suggesting specific areas for potential impact of new technology

A Computational Method for Enabling Teaching-Learning Process in Huge Online Courses and Communities

Massive Open Online Courses and e-learning represent the future of the teaching-learning processes through the development of Information and Communication Technologies. They are the response to the new education needs of society. However, this future also presents many challenges such as the processing of online forums when a huge number of messages are generated. These forums provide an excellent platform for learning and connecting students of the subject, but the difficulties in following and searching the vast volume of information that they generate may produce the opposite effect. In this paper, we propose a computational method for enabling the educational process in huge online learning communities. This method analyses the forum information through Natural Language Processing techniques and extract the main topics discussed. The results generated improves the management of the forums, increases the effectiveness of the teachers’ explanations and reduces the time spent by students to follow the course. The proposal has been complemented with a real case study that shows promising results.This paper has been partially supported by the MESOLAP (TIN2010-14860), GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03), DIIM2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001) and RESCATA (TIN2015-65100-R) projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitiveness

Crowdsourcing Cognitive Presence: A Quantitative Content Analysis of a K12 Educator MOOC Discussion Forum

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer participants opportunities to engage with content and discussion forums similar to other online courses. Pedagogical components of MOOCs and the nature of learning are worth of examining due to issues involving scale, interaction and the role of the instructor (Ross, Sinclair, Know, Bayne & McLeod, 2014). The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework provides a basis for measuring cognitive presence in online discussion forums. As voluntary point of entry to a community of learners, it is important to consider the nature of participant contributions in terms of cognitive presence. This study focused on an educator MOOC because MOOCs have been proposed as an efficient vehicle for providing professional development due to the significant self-identification of participants as educators (Ho et al. 2014). Participant attributes have been categorized, however the discussion forum is difficult to study on a massive scale (Kizilcec, Piech, & Schulz, 2013). Automated measures of cognitive presence may not provide the full view of learning behaviors implicit in messages posted to the forums (Wong, Pursel, Divinsky & Jansen, 2015). To address this gap, the forum messages were hand-coded and analyzed using quantitative content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002). The study found that the measure of exploration increased over the duration of the course. Viewing cognitive presence over time provided a new metaphor for explaining the proportions of cognitive presence in the discussion forum of an educator MOOC. This finding suggests that increased instructor presence during the later stages of the course may increase cognitive presence over time (Akyol & Garrison, 2007; Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005)

Quality Frameworks for MOOCs

The hype surrounding MOOCs has been tempered by scepticism about the quality of MOOCs. The possible flaws of MOOCs include the quality of the pedagogies employed, low completion rates and a failure to deliver on the promise of inclusive and equitable quality education for all. On the other hand, MOOCs that have given a boost to open and online education have become a symbol of a larger modernisation agenda for universities, and are perceived as tools for universities to improve the quality of blended and online education—both in degree education and Continuous Professional Development. MOOC provision is also much more open to external scrutiny as part of a stronger globalising higher education market. This has important consequences for quality frameworks and quality processes that go beyond the individual MOOC. In this context, different quality approaches are discussed including possible measures at different levels and the tension between product and process models. Two case studies are described: one at the institutional level (The Open University) and one at a MOOC platform level (FutureLearn) and how they intertwine is discussed. The importance of a national or international quality framework which carries with it a certification or label is illustrated with the OpenupEd Quality label. Both the label itself and its practical use are described in detail. The examples will illustrate that MOOCs require quality assurance processes tailored to e-learning and open education, embedded in institutional frameworks. The increasing unbundling of educational services may require additional quality processes