MOOCs!

[KentaRawr!]

So, this is what a MOOC is. (Click!) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course)

I'm taking a few right now on Coursera, which are pretty cool. I haven't really fully invested in a MOOC, but I try to at least read/watch all of the materials available. :p

Have you ever taken a class like that? How do you feel about them?

[Christmas]

Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems for Massive Open Online Courses

Not only does student participation decline dramatically throughout the new generation of Web-based courses, but the involvement of teachers in online discussions makes it worse.


It wasn’t so long ago that the excitement surrounding online education reached fever pitch. Various researchers offering free online versions of their university classes found they could attract vast audiences of high quality students from all over the world. The obvious next step was to offer far more of these online classes.

That started a rapid trend and various organisations sprung up to offer online versions of university-level courses that anyone with an Internet connection could sign up for. The highest profile of these are organisations such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX.

But this new golden age of education has rapidly lost its lustre. Earlier this month, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported that the online classes it offered had failed miserably. Only about half of the students who registered ever viewed a lecture and only 4 percent completed a course.

That’s prompted some soul-searching among those who have championed this brave new world of education. The questions that urgently need answering are: what’s gone wrong and how can it be fixed?

Today, Mung Chiang’s research team and their collaborators at Boston University and Microsoft offer their view. These guys have studied the behaviour in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs).

And they have depressing news. They say that participation falls precipitously and continuously throughout a course and that almost half of registered students never post more than twice to the forums. What’s more, the participation of a teacher doesn’t improve matters. Indeed, they say there is some evidence that a teacher’s participation in an online discussion actually increases the rate of decline.

Chiang and co studied the discussion threads associated with 73 courses offered by Coursera. These involved 115,000 students who wrote over 800,000 posts in 170,000 different threads. The team then plotted how the volume of discussion varied through the course and what factors correlate with this decline.

Chiang and co say they’ve found various correlations with the drop. One of these is the amount of peer-graded homework on the course, a factor which moderately increases the rate of decline. More worrying is the discovery that teacher involvement in a thread seems to accelerate the decline (although it also increases the number of posts).

Just how this can be reversed isn’t clear but one potential avenue is to improve the learning experience by making the most valuable posts in discussions more easy to find.

Chiang and co say that posts fall into three categories. The first is small talk, student introductions and the like, that are of little use in completing the course. The second is about course logistics such as when to file homework. And the final category is course-specific questions which are the most useful for students.

The problem is that the useful posts are drowned out by the others, particularly the small talk. “For humanities and social sciences courses, on average more than 30% of the threads are classified as small-talk even long after a course is launched,” say Chiang and co. “Small-talk is a major source of information overload in the forums.”

To help combat this problem, Chiang and co have developed an automated system that spots small talk and filters it out of the firehose. That should help students focus on the useful posts and enhance the learning experience.

Whether that will improve the failing metrics for massive open online courses isn’t clear. But there’s clearly scope for more work to identify the reasons why the courses fail to work for so many students. And if free online education is to get some of lustre back, this work will have to be done quickly.

Press this link (http://www.technologyreview.com/view/522816/data-mining-exposes-embarrassing-problems-for-massive-open-online-courses/) if you do not want to read the wall of text. Opps, you've just read everything? Too bad! :gator:

[Parker]

i find coursera et al pretty cool because there are really smart people who i want to learn from but they are thousands of miles away from me

[KentaRawr!]

It seems like the problem there isn't so much the classes themselves, but the students' lack of participation. But then what causes that lack of participation could be a problem with the class.

One thing that some professors have pointed out in their introductory lectures is just how many people are signed up for their course from all over the world, but I can't help but think that many students had anticipated there being subtitles available in the languages that they speak. If they sign up for the class expecting to be able to understand it but then find out that there isn't a translated version available for them, that could cause a lot of drops. Or, it might be that many translations, even when they're available, just aren't good. I watch lectures with subtitles in English and I can't help but notice that there are loads of mistakes. If the subtitles they provide for other languages are translations based on those subtitles, then I feel sorry for non-English speaking students. :(

Also regarding drop rates, I think it's caused by there being little to lose. You just sign up and bam! Class materials. If you get bored of the class or it just doesn't meet your expectations, it's not like you have any hard obligation to complete it. You can drop or forget about it and you're at the same point you were before signing up. If there was some sort of incentive to really investing your time in the course (besides one's own interest,) I think there'd be less people dropping classes.

[Alive-Cat]

Seems like an idea that could be good! Go for it everybody :greenie:

[Jiro]

I'm creating a MOOC, actually. For the edX platform. It's also my major research project focus. Do you want to know more about MOOCs? WOULD YOU LIKE TO PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN?

[Miss Mae]

God I know so much about MOOCs. So much more than I ever planned to know. Specifically the gamification of MOOCs because I'm apparently dating a gamification expert. If you want to know about MOOCs, he's your man.

[Lone Wolf Leonhart]

Although I've never participated, I love the idea. There was a course back in October based on The Walking Dead and I thought about getting in to that.


The MOOC is titled "Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s The Walking Dead", which will take place for eight weeks starting on October 14 2013 and will run parallel to the upcoming fourth season of the show. The MOOC will be taught by a multidisciplinary team of faculty, whose topics will include: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as it applies to the post-apocalypse; the spread of infectious disease and population modeling; managing stress in disaster situations; and social identity, roles, and stereotyping.

[KentaRawr!]

There's this MOOC coming up on Coursera about narratives in online games. I feel like some of the FFXI and FFXIV fans could add a lot to the discussions they hold there! =)

And tell us all about MOOCs, Miss Mae! How are they gamified? :O

[Miss Mae]

Well, like I said, Jiro the gamification expert is the one most qualified to discuss this, since he is currently working on building a MOOC and writing a masters thesis on the gamification of MOOCs, but since he is taking a break from the forum at the moment...

Basically he is looking at improving the MOOC interface provided by edX, suggesting new learning activities that can be included and why they're important (steering away from the multiple choice that they lean on pretty heavily at the moment). Also discussing things like adding badges and achievements to the interface, user profiles to help students form more of an online identity and improving teacher/student communication to rectify the current power imbalances. Gamification and MOOCs are both reasonably new fields of study, so he's being a bit of a pioneer! It's been really interesting to hear about.

[KentaRawr!]

Well, like I said, Jiro the gamification expert is the one most qualified to discuss this, since he is currently working on building a MOOC and writing a masters thesis on the gamification of MOOCs, but since he is taking a break from the forum at the moment...

Basically he is looking at improving the MOOC interface provided by edX, suggesting new learning activities that can be included and why they're important (steering away from the multiple choice that they lean on pretty heavily at the moment). Also discussing things like adding badges and achievements to the interface, user profiles to help students form more of an online identity and improving teacher/student communication to rectify the current power imbalances. Gamification and MOOCs are both reasonably new fields of study, so he's being a bit of a pioneer! It's been really interesting to hear about.

That's really awesome! That makes me think of this site called "super better." It's not a MOOC by any means, but it kind of "gamified" self-help by letting somebody associate achievements with personal goals, and there was a social aspect to it as well. That sort of an interface in a class-setting sounds really great. Maybe that'd help with the poor participation and high drop rates that Christmas mentioned!

[Miss Mae]

That is the primary intent! Also to ensure resources aren't being wasted by improving communication and whatnot within the company designing the MOOCs, because at the moment there is a bit of wasted energy as people develop similar things simultaneously for their own individual MOOC rather than working with other teams and taking on board the lessons learnt from past/current attempts.

[KentaRawr!]

This isn't really related to MOOCs, but it is related to free, web-based education! I was linked to a TED-Ed lesson recently and I hadn't heard about the platform before. Looking around though, I think I'm probably going to use this quite a bit in the future. My main rationale behind joining a bunch of MOOCs was that I already spend an inordinate amount of time looking at junk on the net, sooo. :lol:

Has anyone used TED-Ed? Think it's good?

Edit: I will say that so far it seems much more community based than MOOCs.

http://ed.ted.com/lessons

Edit 2: I'm not sure if anyone's really interested, but this seems worth checking out:

https://www.coursera.org/course/onlinegames

It's an English class on narrative on in online games. Starts in 2 days! :D I'm exciterated.

[Pike]

I signed up for this Linux thing! https://www.edx.org/course/linuxfoundationx/linuxfoundationx-lfs101x-introduction-1621#.U9Dgd9bY4fE

It's free!