scholarly journals Agent-Supported Peer Collaboration in MOOCs

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stergios Tegos ◽  
Apostolos Mavridis ◽  
Stavros Demetriadis

While massive open online courses (MOOCs) can be effective in scaling education, orchestrating collaborative learning activities for large audiences remains a non-trivial task that introduces a series of practical challenges, such as the lack of adequate human support. Even when collaboration takes place, there is uncertainty whether meaningful interactions will occur among learners. This work presents the architecture of a prototype system called PeerTalk. The system was created to enable instructors to easily incorporate real-time collaborative learning activities into their online courses. Furthermore, PeerTalk employs a conversational agent service that aims to scaffold students’ online collaboration and provide valuable guidance, which can be configured by the course instructor. In order to investigate the user-acceptance of the system, two evaluation studies took place. The first one involved a group of experts, i.e., MOOC instructors who are expected to use such a system in their course, whereas the second study featured 44 postgraduate students. The study findings were encouraging in terms of the system efficiency and usability levels, laying the foundation for a conversational agent service, which can effectively scale the support of the teaching staff and be easily integrated in MOOC platforms, creating further opportunities for valuable social interaction among learners.

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.


Author(s):  
Niyi Awofeso

This chapter examines the contributions of Moodle's Q&A discussion forum platforms to optimizing cooperative and collaborative learning, validity of assessment of discussion forum posts, and achievement of course outcomes. The author studied: (1) How appropriate is the Q&A variant of online discussion forums in facilitating individual and collaborative learning? (2) How may course facilitators equitably grade online learning individual and collaborative learning activities using Q&A discussion forums? (3) Do learners' performance in Q&A category of online discussion forums predict performance in other assignments in online courses? (4) How well do learning activities in Q&A forums achieve courses' learning outcomes compared with other learning approaches? Survey and data analysis conducted by the author at HBMSU, UAE revealed that Moodle's Q&A discussion forum compares favorably with other teaching approaches in facilitating cooperative and collaborative learning, predicting overall learning achievement as well as improving validity of assessments.


Author(s):  
Asma Boudria ◽  
Yacine Lafifi ◽  
Yamina Bordjiba

The free nature and open access courses in the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) allow the facilities of disseminating information for a large number of participants. However, the “massive” propriety can generate many pedagogical problems, such as the assessment of learners, which is considered as the major difficulty facing in the MOOC. In fact, the immense number of learners who exceeded in some MOOC the hundreds of thousands make the instructors' evaluation of students' production quite impossible. In this work, the authors present a new approach for assessing the learners' production in MOOC. This approach combines the peer assessment with the collaborative learning and the calibrated method. It aims at increasing the degree of trust in peer-assessment. For evaluating the proposed approach, the authors implemented a MOOC dedicated for learning algorithms. In addition, an experiment was conducted during two months for knowing the effects of the proposed approach. The obtained results are presented in this paper. They are judged as very interesting and encouraging.


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):  
Tetiana Terletska

The article deals with the question of massive open online courses utilization in educational process of higher education institutions; the background for the courses implementation is analysed, advantages and disadvantages of their utilization to provide distant component of educational process are estimated. In the framework of the research on peculiarities of MOOCs implementation in electronic learning courses in Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University a survey was hold for students of the specialty “Pre-school education” of the second (Master’s) level, where 50 respondents, who completed massive open online courses during their study, took part. According to the result of the survey it was defined that the majority of the students (from 68% to 78% depending on the course) were completely satisfied with the format of study and consider it one of the ways for their professional development in the future. The article describes the difficulties faced by the students in the process of work with MOOCs; possible ways to overcome them were defined. Accordance of possibilities provided with massive open online courses with the requests of modern students to the ways of extracurricular learning implementation was analysed. Positive aspects of the courses utilization as a part of electronic learning courses were highlighted including motivational factor about completing corresponding MOOCs. In addition, the question of readiness of academics to use massive open online courses in their professional activities was taken into consideration. Lecturers of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University were surveyed; the results showed that only 30% of teaching staff had previous experience of using MOOCs in educational process, however, around 80% of respondents are interested in further study and practical utilization of such resources.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-102
Author(s):  
Asma Boudria ◽  
Yacine Lafifi ◽  
Yamina Bordjiba

The free nature and open access courses in the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) allow the facilities of disseminating information for a large number of participants. However, the “massive” propriety can generate many pedagogical problems, such as the assessment of learners, which is considered as the major difficulty facing in the MOOC. In fact, the immense number of learners who exceeded in some MOOC the hundreds of thousands make the instructors' evaluation of students' production quite impossible. In this work, the authors present a new approach for assessing the learners' production in MOOC. This approach combines the peer assessment with the collaborative learning and the calibrated method. It aims at increasing the degree of trust in peer-assessment. For evaluating the proposed approach, the authors implemented a MOOC dedicated for learning algorithms. In addition, an experiment was conducted during two months for knowing the effects of the proposed approach. The obtained results are presented in this paper. They are judged as very interesting and encouraging.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-81
Author(s):  
Mukaramatu Tahiru ◽  
Rosemaliza Kamaludeen

The pattern of learning in recent years have been impacted by the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The impact of MOOCs on the field of education have been investigated by many researches. MOOCs, since their inception have attracted a considerable amount of attention within higher education. This study therefore examines the extent of IIUM postgraduate students’ awareness knowledge of MOOCs, how-to knowledge of MOOCs, actual usage of MOOCs, perceived usefulness of MOOCs, attitude towards MOOCs and intention to use MOOCs for academic purposes. The research question concentrated on the extent of the students’ awareness knowledge, how-to knowledge, perceived usefulness, attitude, actual usage, and intention to use MOOCs for academic purposes. One hundred and ninety respondents were involved in this study. The analysis procedure made use of descriptive statistics to find the percentages, frequencies, mean and standard deviation of data. The findings reveal that majority of the respondents do not have awareness knowledge and how-to knowledge of MOOCs. It also shows very few respondents have actual usage of MOOCs. However, majority of the respondents have positive attitude towards MOOCs and majority of them show their intentions to use MOOCs for academic purposes. The study reveals a vital implication on how IIUM ought to scheme policies to increase adequate awareness of MOOCs and more importantly its usefulness to students.


This study was conducted in order to identify the motivational factors for student in pursuing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). The respondents of this study consisted of 38 postgraduate students studying in Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN). The results showed that students are motivated to enroll MOOC which are offered by prestigious universities. Student’s curiosity to learn the content of MOOC is also another important factor. The study also indicated that students are motivated to pursue MOOC which are supplementary to the content of classes offered by other institutions.


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.


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