Semiautomatic Annotation of MOOC Forum Posts

Massive online open courses' (MOOCs') students who use discussion forums have higher chances of finishing the course. However, little research has been conducted for understanding the underlying factors. One of the reasons which hinders the analysis is the amount of manual work required for annotating posts. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to extrapolate small set of annotations to the whole forum. These annotations not only allow MOOC producers to summarize the state of the forum, but they also allow researchers to deeper understand the role of the forum in the learning process.

Semi-automatic annotation of MOOC forum posts

Pierre Dillenbourg, Lukasz Kidzinski, Weizhe Liu

Massive online open courses’ (MOOCs’) students who use discussion forums have higher chances of finishing the course. However, little research has been conducted for understanding the underlying fac- tors. One of the reasons which hinders the analysis is the amount of manual work required for annotating posts. In this paper we use ma- chine learning techniques to extrapolate small set of annotations to the whole forum. These annotations not only allow MOOC producers to sum- marize the state of the forum, but they also allow researchers to deeper understand the role of the forum in the learning process.

2015

From Seminar to Lecture to MOOC: Scripting and Orchestration at Scale

Stian Haklev

This dissertation investigates the design of large online courses from the pedagogical perspective of knowledge communities. Much of the learning sciences literature has concerned itself with groups of up to 20-30 students, but in universities, courses of several hundred to more than a thousand students are common. At the same time, new models for life-long and informal learning, such as Massive Open Online Courses, are emerging. Amidst this growing enthusiasm for innovation around technology and design in teaching, there is a need for theoretically grounded innovations and rigorous research around practical models that support new approaches to learning. One recent model, known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), engages students in the co-construction of a community knowledge base, with a commonly held understanding of the collective nature of their learning, and then provides a sequence of scaffolded inquiry activities where students make use of the knowledge base as a resource. Inspired by this approach to designing courses, the research began with a redesign of an in-service teacher education course, which increased in size from 25 to 75 students. This redesign was carefully analyzed, and design principles extracted. The second step was the design of a Massive Open Online Course for several thousand in-service teachers on technology and inquiry, in collaboration with an affiliated secondary school. A number of innovative design ideas were necessary to accommodate the large number of users, the much larger diversity in terms of background, interest, and engagement among MOOC learners, and the opportunities provided by the platform. The resulting design encompasses a 6- week long curriculum script, and a number of overlapping micro-scripts supported by a custom- written platform that integrated with the EdX platform in a seamless manner. This thesis presents the course structure, including connection to disciplinary principles, its affordances for community and collaboration and its support of individual differentiated learning and collective epistemology. It offers design principles for scripting and orchestrating collective inquiry designs for MOOCS and higher education courses.

University of Toronto2016

Variations in Pedagogical Design of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Across Disciplines

Stian Haklev

Given that few studies have formally examined pedagogical design considerations of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), this study explored variations in the pedagogical design of six MOOCs offered at the University of Toronto, while considering disciplinary characteristics and expectations of each MOOC. Using a framework (Neumann et al., 2002) characterizing teaching and learning across categories of disciplines, three of the MOOCs represented social sciences and humanities, or “soft” MOOCs, while another three represented sciences, or “hard” MOOCS. We utilized a multicase study design for understanding differences and similarities across MOOCs regarding learning outcomes, assessment methods, interaction design, and curricular content. MOOC instructor interviews, MOOC curricular documents, and discussion forum data comprised the data set. Learning outcomes of the six MOOCs reflected broad cognitive competencies promoted in each MOOC, with the structure of curricular content following disciplinary expectations. The instructors of soft MOOCs adopted a spiral curriculum and created new content in response to learner contributions. Assessment methods in each MOOC aligned well with stated learning outcomes. In soft MOOCs, discussion and exposure to diverse perspectives were promoted while in hard MOOCs there was more emphasis on question and answer. This study shows disciplinary-informed variations in MOOC pedagogy, and highlights instructors’ strategies to foster disciplinary ways of knowing, skills, and practices within the parameters of a generic MOOC platform. Pedagogical approaches such as peer assessment bridged the disciplines. Suggestions for advancing research and practice related to MOOC pedagogy are also included.

Indiana Univ Press2017

From Seminar to Lecture to MOOC: Scripting and Orchestration at Scale

Stian Haklev

University of Toronto2016