Digital Education: At the MOOC Crossroads Where the Interests of Academia and Business Converge

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained popularity over the last years, offering a learning environment with new opportunities and challenges. These courses attract a heterogeneous set of participants who, due to the impossibility of personal tutorship in MOOCs, are required to create their own learning path and manage one’s own learning to achieve their goals. In other words, they should be able to self-regulate their learning. Self-regulated learning (SRL) has been widely explored in settings such as face-to-face or blended learning environments. Nevertheless, research on SRL in MOOCs is still scarce, especially on supporting interventions. In this sense, this document presents MOOCnager, a Chrome plug-in to help learners improve their SRL skills. Specifically, this work focuses on 3 areas: goal setting, time management and selfevaluation. Each area is included in one of the 3 phases composing Zimmerman’s SRL Cyclical Model. In this way, the plug-in aims to support enrolees’ self-regulation throughout their complete learning process. Finally, MOOCnager was uploaded to the Chrome Web Store, in order to get a preliminary evaluation with real participants from 6 edX Java MOOCs designed by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). Results were not conclusive as the use of the plug-in by the participants was very low. However, learners seem to prefer a seamless tool, integrated in the MOOC platform, which is able to assist them without any learner-tool interaction.

Emotions and learning are inextricably linked and as such, computer-based learning environments should be cognisant of learning-enhancing emotions. More research, however, is needed to identify the factors that lead to specific emotions in digital and online learning environments, along with research to explore our understanding of the effects that different emotions can have on learning and on performance. This paper reports on a study-in-progress in the National Institute for Digital Learning in Dublin City University in Ireland, which is investigating the relationship between emotion and learning in Language MOOCs (LMOOCs). This study reports on preliminary findings of the first run of the Irish 101: Introduction to Irish Language and Culture, LMOOC, hosted on the FutureLearn platform. Using an experience sampling method, participants self-reported on their emotional experience after completing a range of activities during the three-week course. Initial findings show that Curiosity was the emotion participants felt most strongly, followed by Excitement, Hope and Pride. Affective states shifted over the duration of the course, most notably from week 1 to week 2, and following various MOOC activities. This paper concludes by providing an initial insight into the importance of considering learner affect in an LMOOC and in MOOCs more generally.

As Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are nowadays used in an increasingly ubiquitous manner, the learning process gets disrupted every time learners change context. Mobile-Assisted Seamless Learning (MSL) techniques have been identified to reduce unwanted overhead for learners and streamline their learning process. However, technical implementations vary across the industry. This paper examines existing MSL research and applied techniques in the context of MOOCs. Therefore, we discussed related MSL research topics. Afterward, eleven characteristic MSL features were selected and compared their implementations across five major MOOC platforms. While web applications provide a bigger feature set, mobile clients offer advanced offline capabilities. Based on the findings, a concept outlines how MSL features can enhance the learning experience on MOOC platforms while considering the technical feasibility.

MOOCs are becoming more and more integrated in the higher education landscape of learning, with many institutions now pushing their students towards MOOC as part of their curriculum. But what does it mean for other MOOC learners? Are these students socializing the same way when they have an easier possibility to interact with classmates offline? Is the fact that they do not personally choose to enroll in a MOOC also having an effect? In this paper, we compare university-enrolled students to other MOOC participants and in particular other self-enrolled students, to examine how and why they socialize on and around the MOOC. Using data from two French MOOCs in project management, we show that university-enrolled students are less attracted by forums and seem to interact less than others when the workload increases, which could lead to misleading conclusions when analyzing data. We therefore encourage MOOC researchers to be particularly mindful of this new trend when performing social network analyses.

MOOCs represent an opportunity for companies to either save money, by asking their employees to follow a free course instead of using paying services, or to freely increase the proportion of workers who benefit from training opportunities. Some companies go beyond providing mere encouragements to follow these online courses. They can set common time slots for employees to collaborate on the course, allow them to follow the MOOC during working hours, discharge them of some tasks, or even reward, to some extent, those who manage to complete the course. In this article, we study these practices through a survey that was answered by 1847 users of Unow, a French platform that used to design MOOCs that targeted companies. It is uncommon for employees to be allowed to follow the course during working hours. MOOCs are typically integrated in an informal way, since they do not fit in the traditional frameworks structuring professional training in companies. It comes at a risk for employees, who may have to negotiate in an interpersonal way in what conditions the course is followed, without the protection of negotiated company agreements.

Teaching mediated by computers allows tracing some forms of students’ participation as all their actions/reactions are recorded including time spent on any pedagogical resource offered. For a quiz, response time provides an additional variable enriching the simple correctness of answers. The present study intends to describe and model different patterns of time-related participation, performances (answer correctness) and the relation between the two parameters which measures the time productivity using quantile regression.

Reaching goals can be challenging, especially if they are not in the near future like with learning in MOOCs. The aim of this explorative study was to get insight in this goal achievement process, which can help to understand learner behaviour. Two research questions were examined namely: (1) what goals do learners set, and do they succeed in reaching these goals? and (2) how does the course of action of several learners look taking Gollwitzer’s Rubikon model of action phases as a guideline? We found that even though learners did not achieve the goals they set, they were still generally satisfied with the knowledge they gained. In addition, learners went more or less intuitively through the theorised action phases, yet typically did not take the time to deliberately plan (before the start) and evaluate (after finishing) their learning process. This insight can serve as starting point for developing supporting tools for learners and personalised dashboards, which can offer the tools at appropriate times in a learner’s course of action.

Studies on massive open online courses (MOOCs) users discuss the existence of typical profiles and their impact on the learning process of the students. However defining the typical behaviors as well as classifying the users accordingly is a difficult task. In this paper we suggest two methods to model MOOC users behaviour given their log data. We mold their behavior into a Markov Decision Process framework. We associate the user’s intentions with the MDP reward and argue that this allows us to classify them.

Although Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been reported as an effective educational tool offering numerous opportunities in online learning, the high dropout rates and the lack of learners’ motivation are factors concerning researchers and instructors. The one-size-fits-all instructional approach that most courses follow, failing to address the individual needs of learners, has been seen as their weakest point. Recent efforts focus on the inclusion of active learning pedagogies in MOOCs to stimulate the interaction among the participants and to keep them engaged. However, taking into account that in these massive contexts the learners face several issues while trying to keep up with the course, the incorporation of active learning strategies may introduce additional problems to the learning process. This study explores the problems that learners experienced in a MOOC implementing collaboration and gamification strategies. As the results reveal, the introduction of collaborative learning activities can generate additional problems to learners and for that reason, a careful design and a proper scaffolding is needed in an early stage to overcome the problems that will occur. No significant problems were reported regarding the implementation of gamification elements.

This paper investigates the pedagogical benefits that 17 lecturers involved in the design of a MOOC reported in a questionnaire survey. Results reveal a fair amount of gains for several teaching skills and a strong appreciation of the collective training approach practiced during the 9-month MOOCs production process. These findings are of interest to staff development units, technology-enhanced learning competent bodies, and researchers concerned with collective modalities for scholarship of teaching and learning.

Universities which produce massive open online courses (MOOCs) and offer them on global e-learning platforms define internationalization as one of their main objectives. Empirical research that test the impact of MOOC production on international students’ enrollment is still rare. Present study is the first stage of bridging this gap. To do so, correlation analysis is applied to two data sets, which are universities MOOC portfolio derived from Class Central aggregator and international students statistics from QS World Universities Ranking. Three hundred top MOOC producers which are universities from different countries were analyzed. No strong statistically significant correlation was found. The same is true for the US universities as a subsample. Further research regarding annual statistics is required to continue the discussion and to approach the interrelation between MOOC production and its impact on university key performance indicators.

Today’s globalization affects the higher education at its core system, policies, and new models of education delivery but also for students’ mobility. In the era of online and mobile learning, of massive open online courses (MOOCs), adding virtual components to students and/or teacher mobility has become a requirement. Virtual Mobility (VM) has a great potential to contribute to the internationalization, innovation and inclusion in higher education. This paper presents the design and the development of the Open Virtual mobility Learning Hub (OpenVM) as a collaborative online and mobile environment for promoting VM Skills of educators and students in the European Higher Education Area. The OpenVM Learning Hub assists to enhance the Virtual Mobility readiness of higher education institutions, educators and students through achievement, assessment and recognition of VM skills. The OpenVM Learning Hub includes interactive, multiple levels MOOCs in VM Skills, the VM Skills assessment, VM Skills, Open Badges and open virtual mobilities collaboration for different stakeholders. This paper analyses different scenarios for the OpenVM Learning hub, its development based on open education principles and the inclusion of the first Open VM MOOC.

MOOC are an educational phenomenon that have become a key resource for lifelong learning in today’s society. The most common MOOC model offered by the main platforms is called xMOOC, which has a behaviorist approach, where the role of the participant is minimal, being reduced to their contributions in a forum. There are proposals that try to bring the original model of MOOC or cMOOC, with a connectivist approach, through external virtual learning communities using digital social networks or any type of collaborative platform on the web. This collective knowledge, result of participation in the MOOC, has the disadvantage of being hidden in a space with excess information, disordered and alien to the MOOC platform. This paper presents and analyzes an experience that aims to solve these problems within platforms where the content cannot be modified while offering teaching, through the use of external web tools. These make it possible to integrate and organise the learning results generated throughout the MOOC, within the content itself, at the same time as they were happening, building a course that is fed in real time by the contributions of its participants, giving them greater prominence.

Enigmas have been introduced in a series of MOOCs (open and massive online courses) named eFAN “Teaching and Training with Digital”. In this text, we explain why we have chosen to propose enigmas in a Mooc, as a factor of interest, a driving force for learning and to foster collaboration between participants. Several enigmas are described, explaining why we consider them as important in our MOOCs series. We finally give the floor to the participants, what were their opinions on the interest of the enigmas. A coming book will provide an analysis of 25 enigmas and report on puzzle solving processes in discussion forums.

The University of Queensland’s (UQ) Sustainable Energy MicroMasters series was offered for the first time in 2018 on the edX platform. The MicroMasters series is comprised of four courses with a capstone assessment. When the courses closed in December 2018, a review was undertaken of the participation levels and achievement outcomes of participants in both the verified and audit enrollment modes. The total enrollment in all courses in the MicroMasters was 22,093. The proportion of participants who enrolled in the verified enrollment mode was less than 2.5% per course. The proportion of verified participants who passed (achieved 70% or higher in the final grade) ranged between 29–67%, with the more technical courses having the lower pass rates. A total of 134 course certificates were delivered to 95 participants enrolled in one or more of the four courses, with over three quarters of participants who received a course certificate only achieving one certificate. Verified participants take time to achieve four certificates which has implications for articulation to on-campus or external Master programs and first and second semester entry points. If MOOCs are to be part of a university’s delivery mode there will need to be a large increase in the number of students electing and paying to be part of the verified enrollment mode to justify the development costs and ongoing support required to run such a series. Changes to enrollment policies that affect verified enrollments, introduced by platform providers such as edX, will need to be monitored.

In the next ten years «more than a third of the core skills needed to perform most jobs will be made up of skills currently not yet considered crucial to the jobs» [1]. MOOCs are what public and private players are currently using to train their employees and workers. For that reason, producing a MOOC requires high attention to its design and must involve specialized experts with dedicated skills.

This contribution reports the production workflow at Federica, the leading MOOC platform in Italy and one of the top MOOC providers in Europe, and also describes the experts and skills engaged in it.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have gained traction across the higher education sector and beyond. However, there are concerns about their future and sustainability. Sometimes academics have no budget to maintain their MOOCs. This paper reports on the work in progress of redesigning a Study Skills MOOC to ensure its value past its funding period. Strategies include: (1) using discussion forums as an open space for comments and not for guided activities; (2) replacing collaborative e-tivities with multiple-choice questions with automated feedback; (3) including sample tweets to encourage participants to connect with the community beyond the boundaries of the MOOC platform; and (4) adding new multimedia resources such as brief video explanations and infographics. By shifting the focus from the learning community to interactions with the content, the Study Skills MOOC is becoming a set of massive open online resources, a MOOR. While its spirit is different, it still provides a structured sequence of materials that can help learners interested in developing their study skills. Our experience might serve as guidance for academics and institutions facing the same financial challenges. We hope that people around the world find the MOOR beneficial and use it to enhance their self-efficacy.

As Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) generate a huge amount of learning activity data through its thousands of users, great potential is provided to use this data to understand and optimize the learning experience and outcome, which is the goal of Learning Analytics. But first, the data needs to be collected, processed, analyzed and reported in order to gain actionable insights. Technical concepts and implementations are rarely accessible and therefore this work presents an architecture how Learning Analytics can be implemented in a service-oriented MOOC platform. To achieve that, a service based on extensible schema-agnostic processing pipelines is introduced for the HPI MOOC platform. The approach was evaluated regarding its scalability, extensibility, and versatility with real-world use cases. Also, data privacy was taken into account. Based on five years of running the service in production on several platform deployments, six design recommendations are presented which can be utilized as best practices for platform vendors and researchers when implementing Learning Analytics in MOOCs.

This paper presents the experience of the MOOC “Embracing Diversity”, developed for the IN2IT Project and hosted on Polimi Open Knowledge, the MOOC programme of Politecnico di Milano (https://​www.​pok.​polimi.​it/​). A follow up of the MOOC, represented by an ongoing special edition of the course, focused specifically on gender and STEM, is also shortly presented.

In this paper we will present:

As the number of MOOCs increase over the years, more data has become available which show poor completion rates (on average between 5 and 10%). IFP School has been producing MOOCs since 2014 introducing innovative pedagogical techniques to improve learner motivation by integrating games into our MOOC’s.

In this paper we describe how this MOOC was built through the use of this character and the other pedagogical innovation that was introduced. The results show an unusual environment that increased the learners motivation to help the character. Since helping the character meant going through the different activities proposed in the MOOC, in our opinion, it was the main reason that led to the high completion rate of 20% that was obtained.