scholarly journals Architectural approach for automatic follow up of learning activities in massive open online courses

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (37) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Daniel Alberto Jaramillo Morillo ◽  
Mario Fernando Solarte Sarasty

Currently it has been generated great interest in the massive open online courses, because they are consider as an “educational revolution”, since they are presented as a solution to the growing demand for higher education both in Colombia and in the world. Their main objective is to achieve a high volume of participants, allowing a global reach and a more participative learning. However, as advantages arise due to their massiveness, a number of problems or challenges are also generated. One of the main difficulties that characterize this type of courses is the lack of a suitable relationship between tutor and students, since it is impossible that tutors have a personal relationship with each of the thousands of participants. Therefore certain types of activities such as assessment and monitoring get more difficult impacting the quality of learning. In this article, it is proposed an architectural approach for tracking learning activities, which is intended to improve tutor-student relationship in an environment of massiveness to maximize the quality of learning in massive open online courses.

2018 ◽  
Vol 119 (9/10) ◽  
pp. 572-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alok Baikadi ◽  
Carrie Demmans Epp ◽  
Christian D. Schunn

Purpose The purpose of this study was to provide a new characterization of the extent to which learners complete learning activities in massive open online courses (MOOCs), a central challenge in these contexts. Prior explorations of learner interactions with MOOC materials have often described these interactions through stereotypes, which accounts for neither the full spectrum of potential learner activities nor the ways those patterns differ across course designs. Design/methodology/approach To overcome these shortcomings, the authors apply confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis to learner activities within three MOOCs to test different models of participation across courses and populations found within those courses. Findings Courses varied in the extent to which participation was driven by learning activities vs time/topic or a mixture of both, but this was stable across offerings of the same course. Research limitations/implications The results call for a reconceptualization of how different learning activities within a MOOC are designed to work together, to better allow strong learning outcomes even within one activity form or more strongly encourage participation across activities. Originality/value The authors validate new continuous-patterns rather than a discrete-pattern participation model for MOOC learning.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanya Liu ◽  
Cheng Ni ◽  
Zhi Liu ◽  
Xian Peng ◽  
Hercy N.H. Cheng

Nowadays, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) has obtained a rapid development and drawn much attention from the areas of learning analytics and artificial intelligence. There are lots of unstructured data being generated in online reviews area. The learning behavioral data become more and more diverse, and they prompt the emergence of big data in education. To mine useful information from these data, we need to use educational data mining and learning analysis technique to study the learning feelings and discussed topics among learners. This paper aims to mine and analyze topic information hidden in the unstructured reviews data in MOOC, a novel author topic model based on an unsupervised learning idea is proposed to extract learning topics for the each learner. According to the experimental results, we will analyze and focuses of interests of learners, which facilitates further personalized course recommendation and improve the quality of online courses.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Khalil ◽  
Hubert Brunner ◽  
Martin Ebner

Massive Open Online Courses, shortly MOOCs, are a phenomenon nowadays. The number of courses is worldwide steadily increasing since Sebastian Thrun has offered a free online course for more than 100.000 students. Nowadays, decision makers and students as well as lecturers are asking about the quality of such courses. After a live experiment on 15 randomly chosen courses and a brief literature review, we discuss the possibility of finding an evaluation grid for xMOOCs. The finally suggested criteria can be used now for future investigations.


2015 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 77-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anoush Margaryan ◽  
Manuela Bianco ◽  
Allison Littlejohn

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
QIU-HU DENG

Since the birth of massive open online courses (MOOC) in 2011, MOOC has developed rapidly all over the world. MOOC platform has developed from providing courses to providing social recognized degree certificates for learners. There are many MOOC platforms at home and abroad. Many scholars believe that MOOC is a destructive innovation form of education. Many famous schools have launched MOOC projects. After years of development, the platforms launch course combinations to meet the needs of learners and provide certification according to the market demand. MOOC is conducive to promoting teaching innovation, promoting the sharing of high-quality resources, improving the quality of teaching, expanding education services, and building a lifelong learning society. Learners should start from their own interests, choose suitable learning projects, actively, consciously and diligently complete online learning, so that MOOC learning can be effective and applied.


ReCALL ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Rong Luo ◽  
Zixuan Ye

Abstract This paper focuses on quality assurance in language massive open online courses (LMOOCs). It is a qualitative study that adopts the grounded theory method and analyses evaluative comments on the quality of LMOOCs from learners’ perspectives. With the data collected from 1,000 evaluations from English as a second language (ESL) learners on China’s biggest MOOC platform “iCourse”, this study examines what has influenced learners’ perceptions of LMOOCs and identifies the specific quality criteria of five types of them, including ESL courses for speaking, reading, writing, cultural studies, and integrated skills. The results of the study will lay a foundation for the establishment of a quality criteria framework for LMOOCs and provide insights into design principles for effective online language courses tailored to the diverse needs of a massive number of language learners.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Billy Tak-ming Wong

PurposeThis paper examines the pedagogical features of massive open online courses (MOOCs) for language learning–known as language MOOCs. The mainstream pedagogy of MOOCs typically involves the provision of short videos and reading materials for self-study; discussion forums, mostly for peer-to-peer interaction on course content; and machine-graded quizzes for self-assessment. For language learning, which has been conventionally understood as skill development, the pedagogical features of relevant MOOCs have yet to be comprehensively surveyed.Design/methodology/approachThis study surveyed a total of 123 language MOOCs from the major MOOC platforms. The pedagogical features shown in these courses were identified and categorised according to the types of course materials and learning activities as well as the participation of learners and instructors.FindingsEnglish was the most common language taught in the courses. Over 80% of the courses took not more than six hours to complete. Most of these courses followed the typical approach of xMOOC delivery, with video watching, reading and auto-graded assessment being the most common learning activities. Less than half of the courses included discussion as part of learning, and instructors were involved in less than 30% of the discussion.Originality/valueThe findings show that, despite the technological advances in course delivery, current language MOOCs do not differ substantially from conventional distance language learning. Yet, the utilisation of computer-assisted language learning technology and the massive student base of MOOCs for creating a virtual social community are opportunities for developing learners' language proficiency on this learning environment.


Author(s):  
Ana S. Moura ◽  
M. Natália D.S. Cordeiro

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced in recent years a significant growth in courses'offer and the number of enrolled students. Nevertheless, the controversy regarding if its quality is reliable, namely in student evaluation and assessment, has not found closure. In this study, we aim at establishing an initial prospection of the academic teaching professionals' perspective regarding the quality of the most common/usual evaluation methods and tools used in MOOCs. After the elaboration of a questionnaire and its implementation to an international sample of academic professors, the analysis of the answers allows perceiving which MOOC grading methods are acceptable in presential Higher Education courses and its eventual acceptable weight in the final grade. Further, within certain constraints, a large percentage of the inquired academics presented no problem with the inclusion of MOOC grading methods on their non-online courses. Overall, within those constraints, the academics felt the quality of the academic orthodox courses was maintained, a perspective that can contribute to change eventual suspicious attitudes regarding  MOOCs evaluation methodologies and their student assessment. 


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