83,495 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Quality in MOOCs: Surveying the Terrain
The purpose of this review is to identify quality measures and to highlight some of the tensions surrounding notions of quality, as well as the need for new ways of thinking about and approaching quality in MOOCs. It draws on the literature on both MOOCs and quality in education more generally in order to provide a framework for thinking about quality and the different variables and questions that must be considered when conceptualising quality in MOOCs. The review adopts a relativist approach, positioning quality as a measure for a specific purpose. The review draws upon Biggs’s (1993) 3P model to explore notions and dimensions of quality in relation to MOOCs — presage, process and product variables — which correspond to an input–environment–output model. The review brings together literature examining how quality should be interpreted and assessed in MOOCs at a more general and theoretical level, as well as empirical research studies that explore how these ideas about quality can be operationalised, including the measures and instruments that can be employed. What emerges from the literature are the complexities involved in interpreting and measuring quality in MOOCs and the importance of both context and perspective to discussions of quality
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
Together we stand, Together we fall, Together we win: Dynamic Team Formation in Massive Open Online Courses
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer a new scalable paradigm for
e-learning by providing students with global exposure and opportunities for
connecting and interacting with millions of people all around the world. Very
often, students work as teams to effectively accomplish course related tasks.
However, due to lack of face to face interaction, it becomes difficult for MOOC
students to collaborate. Additionally, the instructor also faces challenges in
manually organizing students into teams because students flock to these MOOCs
in huge numbers. Thus, the proposed research is aimed at developing a robust
methodology for dynamic team formation in MOOCs, the theoretical framework for
which is grounded at the confluence of organizational team theory, social
network analysis and machine learning. A prerequisite for such an undertaking
is that we understand the fact that, each and every informal tie established
among students offers the opportunities to influence and be influenced.
Therefore, we aim to extract value from the inherent connectedness of students
in the MOOC. These connections carry with them radical implications for the way
students understand each other in the networked learning community. Our
approach will enable course instructors to automatically group students in
teams that have fairly balanced social connections with their peers, well
defined in terms of appropriately selected qualitative and quantitative network
metrics.Comment: In Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Conference on Application of
Digital Information & Web Technologies (ICADIWT), India, February 2014 (6
pages, 3 figures
Your click decides your fate: Inferring Information Processing and Attrition Behavior from MOOC Video Clickstream Interactions
In this work, we explore video lecture interaction in Massive Open Online
Courses (MOOCs), which is central to student learning experience on these
educational platforms. As a research contribution, we operationalize video
lecture clickstreams of students into cognitively plausible higher level
behaviors, and construct a quantitative information processing index, which can
aid instructors to better understand MOOC hurdles and reason about
unsatisfactory learning outcomes. Our results illustrate how such a metric
inspired by cognitive psychology can help answer critical questions regarding
students' engagement, their future click interactions and participation
trajectories that lead to in-video & course dropouts. Implications for research
and practice are discusse
Capturing "attrition intensifying" structural traits from didactic interaction sequences of MOOC learners
This work is an attempt to discover hidden structural configurations in
learning activity sequences of students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Leveraging combined representations of video clickstream interactions and forum
activities, we seek to fundamentally understand traits that are predictive of
decreasing engagement over time. Grounded in the interdisciplinary field of
network science, we follow a graph based approach to successfully extract
indicators of active and passive MOOC participation that reflect persistence
and regularity in the overall interaction footprint. Using these rich
educational semantics, we focus on the problem of predicting student attrition,
one of the major highlights of MOOC literature in the recent years. Our results
indicate an improvement over a baseline ngram based approach in capturing
"attrition intensifying" features from the learning activities that MOOC
learners engage in. Implications for some compelling future research are
discussed.Comment: "Shared Task" submission for EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Modeling Large
Scale Social Interaction in Massively Open Online Course
- …