Engaging with Massive Online Courses
Abstract
The Web has enabled one of the most visible recent developments in education---the deployment of massive open online courses. With their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning. Despite this early promise, however, MOOCs are still relatively unexplored and poorly understood. In a MOOC, each student's complete interaction with the course materials takes place on the Web, thus providing a record of learner activity of unprecedented scale and resolution. In this work, we use such trace data to develop a conceptual framework for understanding how users currently engage with MOOCs. We develop a taxonomy of individual behavior, examine the different behavioral patterns of high- and low-achieving students, and investigate how forum participation relates to other parts of the course. We also report on a large-scale deployment of badges as incentives for engagement in a MOOC, including randomized experiments in which the presentation of badges was varied across sub-populations. We find that making badges more salient produced increases in forum engagement.
- Publication:
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arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- March 2014
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1403.3100
- Bibcode:
- 2014arXiv1403.3100A
- Keywords:
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- Computer Science - Social and Information Networks;
- Physics - Physics and Society;
- Statistics - Machine Learning;
- H.2.8
- E-Print:
- WWW 2014