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Anderson, 2014 Engaging with Massive Online Courses

Abstract: The Web has enabled one of the most visible recent developments

in education—the deployment of massive open online courses. With

their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have

the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning. Despite

this early promise, however, MOOCs are still relatively unexplored

and poorly understood.

In a MOOC, each student’s complete interaction with the course

materials takes place on theWeb, thus providing a record of learner

activity of unprecedented scale and resolution. In this work, we

use such trace data to develop a conceptual framework for understanding

how users currently engage with MOOCs. We develop a

taxonomy of individual behavior, examine the different behavioral

patterns of high- and low-achieving students, and investigate how

forum participation relates to other parts of the course.

We also report on a large-scale deployment of badges as incentives

for engagement in a MOOC, including randomized experiments

in which the presentation of badges was varied across subpopulations.

We find that making badges more salient produced

increases in forum engagement.


Materials

Adobe PDF Engaging with Massive Online Courses
Abstract: The Web has enabled one of the most visible recent developments
in education—the deployment of massive open online courses. With
their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have
the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning. Despite
this early promise, however, MOOCs are still relatively unexplored
and poorly understood.
In a MOOC, each student’s complete interaction with the course
materials takes place on theWeb, thus providing a record of learner
activity of unprecedented scale and resolution. In this work, we
use such trace data to develop a conceptual framework for understanding
how users currently engage with MOOCs. We develop a
taxonomy of individual behavior, examine the different behavioral
patterns of high- and low-achieving students, and investigate how
forum participation relates to other parts of the course.
We also report on a large-scale deployment of badges as incentives
for engagement in a MOOC, including randomized experiments
in which the presentation of badges was varied across subpopulations.
We find that making badges more salient produced
increases in forum engagement.

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