In 2012, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) promised to change education by making college-level courses available and accessible to everyone. No breakthrough happened in education, and MOOCs' droprate was significantly high. Since MOOCs did not keep the promise and evenly suffered high droprate, MOOCs was considered as a failure. Despite the setbacks, MOOCs still have the potential to make a impact on education. Given the insights learned from the data visualization of 60 Coursera MOOCs, there is still hope for a MOOCs comeback, because MOOCs serves as a platform for experimenting other educational technologies in a large-scale classroom context and supports both in-person and online learning.
Intro to Psych has a forum thread on Digital Labcoat, which is an online learning tool that can launch students' surveys on a range of topics. The class also uses Peer Scholar, a peer-assessment technology that allows students to share assignments and receive anonymous peer feedback. This tool also personalizes feedback and encourages students to reflect on the personalized feedback.
Given this example, we can conclude that MOOCs can serve as a platform to test and promote other educational technologies. With MOOCs, it is convenient to experiment with new Internet-based technologies in the classroom since they are more compatible with online classes than conventional classrooms. For example, Peer Scholar makes sense in the online world where people cannot physically meet each other to do peer review. However, the traditional classroom may not be a welcoming place for the new technology, because they already have something that works: real-time peer feedback. Students can do peer review during class hours or as homework. Peer Scholar seems like an excessive step when students can do in-person peer review or simply exchange their assigments through various means of communication such as email for peer commentary
Also, integrating these Internet-based technologies in the classroom would often meet resistance from social constructivists. Social constructivism is a learning theory that claims that groups construct knowledge from one another and create a culture of collective artifacts with shared meanings. From the social constructivism perspective, in-person feedback instead of Peer Scholar would greatly support learning, because it allows social connection and social learning through body language, which is something that these edtechs lack. Social constructivists would see the lack of body language as a limitation of Internet-based educational technologies, so they could use this argument against experimenting these Internet-based technologies in the classroom. However, that argument is not valid in the online world where you simply don't get the luxury of in-person interactions. As a result, experimentation with these technologies is more welcomed in online classes.
Furthermore, MOOCs make it easy to test new technologies on a large and diverse pool of users since they have access to a large audience from all the over world. As an example of learning at scale, MOOCs attracts a large audience from various backgrounds with its association with world-renowned universities. Even though MOOCs has a high dropout rate and does not provide education equity, it is good at reaching out to people on the global scale. One way to take full advantage of this power is to test new educational technologies like Peer Scholar and Digital LabCoat in MOOCs. Furthermore, with this access to many students, MOOCs should focus on ways to connect people online and in real time to propagate and strengthen the learning communities. Though MOOCs may need to resdesign its platform to not just attract but also keep students, there exist a fundamental foundation and educational material in MOOCs that could provide both online and in-person learning.
MOOCs offer a mix of online and real-time learning; in other word, they can support hybrid learning. In the Startup Engineering class, about 6% of its 6414 discussion threads are dedicated to meetups and hackathons. Also, the threads in various other classes like Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society and A Brief History of Humankind encourage students to connect and communicate with classmates, professors, and guest speakers. These threads are a result of students taking the initiative or the class requiring in-person meetups and networking. Either way, people can get together in real life for group activities through MOOCs. As a result, this class demonstrates that MOOCs has the capabilities to offer a mix of online learning and in-person learning: a hybrid education. Though the example from the Startup Engineering class is not common in MOOCs, it shows that people are willing to meet in person if there is a concrete and specific goal that can be achieved by getting together. In this case, the students are interested in doing hackathons as teams, networking, and possibly founding startups together. These activities are specific, relevant, and feasible, thus they are appealing to goal-oriented students. Plus, they also offer possibilities of immediate rewards such as hackathon prizes and startups.
MOOCs can incorporate classes, assignments, and activities that encourage in-person interactions through these incentives like competitions and prizes. Furthermore, the hybrid model would be more aligned with the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) which is a sociological theory that equally favors both human and non-human elements in a network. From the ANT perspective, MOOCs would be a network of human and nonhuman entities. The human entities would include the users such as students, instructors, and staff. The nonhuman entities would be the Learning Management System (LMS), other software applications, online material, the computers, the keyboards, and any other technological components in MOOCs. According to ANT, both the human and nonhuman entities should have the same amount of value and agency in determining this social network MOOCs. In reality, the human entities arguably have more power in determining MOOCs. As a personalized technology, MOOCs has been proven to work if the user is self-motivated, disciplined, and college-level educated. That is, MOOCs is directly governed by the people. Similarly, MOOCs technologies do not provide education equity, so that can be interpreted as a lack of agency from the technological elements in the network.
Somehow, we need to find a balance between the values of human and nonhuman components in MOOCs. First, we can try boosting the value of MOOCs technologies by enabling its power to bring people together in real-life for common goals or rewards. Second, it is important to use MOOCs to strengthen online communities.
Given MOOCs as a platform for edtech experiments and hybrid learning in MOOCs, there is still hope for an improved version of MOOC that could make an impact in education. The data visualization of the 60 Coursera classes and their discussion forums gives some insights that point to the optimistic conclusion about MOOCs. You can play around with the data visualization to see what you can infer from your observations.
The bubble chart is dominated by blue bubbles, indicating that the majority of this 60-MOOC sample consists of quantitative courses. Nevertheless, the class with the largest number of users is not quantitative. It is Introduction to Psychology, which falls under science. In fact, the second most popular class (Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence) is a business class rather than a quantitative one. Finally, Startup Engineering, a quantitative class, takes the third place in the popularity contest.
Each class seems to have a different culture shown by the kinds of topics that students discuss in the forum. Still, there is a similar trend in some of the classes I have seen so far. The earlier weeks/modules such as Week 1 and Module 1 usually have more threads than the later ones like Week 7 and Module 6. One justification for this observation is that interest in the material may decline as users progress through the courses, so they may be less active in discussion forums.
I would like to visualize more data about MOOCs discussion forums, so this project is still ongoing.