OCCUPY MOOCs: UNDERSTANDING USERS’ MOTIVATIONS, PERCEPTIONS,  AND ACTIVITY TRAJECTORIES 

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OCCUPY MOOCs: UNDERSTANDING USERS’ MOTIVATIONS, PERCEPTIONS,  AND ACTIVITY TRAJECTORIES

ABSTRACT

Compared with traditional online courses, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are larger in scale, distributed worldwide, clear of financial barriers, and without geographic constraints. MOOCs provide an opportunity to teach interesting or critical content to new groups of learners who may not otherwise have the chance to receive high-quality education. As such, MOOCs have inspired rethinking and innovation in university education. Tens of thousands of enrolled students create a disruptive scale factor that raises both new possibilities and challenges, while inviting new visions and agendas.

Although MOOCs have been broadly recognized and are considered to be an innovation in online education, researchers and practitioners have little understanding of (1) what the best practices are for students, instructors, or even MOOC carriers because of the newness of the MOOC paradigm, (2) how to improve student retention given the high dropout rate and (3) how to better support MOOC instructors to help them produce more attractive MOOCs. To better understand and address these issues, I apply mixed methods – interviews and various sorts of log data analysis – to characterize distinctive students’ and instructors’ motivations, perceptions, challenges and activity patterns during learning/teaching in MOOCs. Based on this richer understanding, I use scenario based design method to identify and present instructional and platform design implications for the next generation of MOOCs.

Chapter 1 

Introduction

 1.1 Motivation

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a recent expansion in e-learning and distant education that have experienced rapid development and achieved substantial attention from a broad range of learners. Compared to traditional online courses, MOOCs are larger in scale and distributed worldwide across a variety of networks and platforms, with no limitations on individual involvement. MOOCs provide an opportunity to teach interesting or critical content to new groups of learners (Knox et al. 2012); they also may have important impacts for online education practices in general, for instance allowing institutions to develop distinctive MOOCcentered missions (Daniel 2012). As Siemens noted “even if the current generation of MOOCs spectacularly crash and fade into oblivion, the legacy of top tier university research and growing public awareness of online learning will be dramatic” (Siemens 2012).

Although MOOCs have been broadly recognized and are considered to be an innovation in online education, researchers and practitioners have little understanding of  (1) what the best practices are for students, instructors, or even MOOC carriers because of the newness of the MOOC paradigm, (2) how to improve student retention given the high dropout rate and (3) how to better support MOOC instructors to help them produce more attractive MOOCs.

In comparison to the more long-lived concept of a virtual learning environment (VLE), MOOCs are a relatively new phenomenon. They differ from VLEs from several ways including scale, students’ level of control and flexibility, the relative roles of instructor and students, student motivation and outcomes. Although efforts have been made to understand user experiences (UX) of VLEs (Martin et al. 2008, Müller et al. 2010, Schaik 2009, Zaharias & Mehlenbacher 2012), differences such as these can cause a misalignment of UX observations for VLEs situations. Thus, educators have called for studies of user experiences in the context of MOOCs (Milligan et al. 2013, Haywood 2012). Milligan emphasized, “understanding the nature of learners and their engagement is critical to the success of any online education provision, especially those MOOCs where there is an expectation that the learners should self-motivate and self-direct their learning (Milligan et al. 2013).”

Notably, MOOCs have been regarded as having the issue of high drop-out rates (Adamopoulos 2013, Clow 2013, Downes 2010, Knowledge 2013, Lewin 2013). Although several studies have investigated students’ retention and engagement issues, surprisingly little research attention has been directed to the population of students who do not finish the courses in which they register (Adamopoulos 2013, Milligan et al. 2013); as a result it is difficult to fully capture the user experiences tied to retention problems, and many important reflections are missed (Satchell & Dourish 2009). In recent years, some researchers have been using data mining method to investigate enrollment and retention within large datasets (Huang et al. 2014, Mak et al. 2010, Kizilcec et al. 2013). Nevertheless, even these researchers have called for qualitative studies that can complement and help to the quantitative trends and patterns mined from the online data (Kizilcec et al. 2013). It is essential to understand student motivations, learning perceptions and experiences towards MOOCs, and to understand how the affordances and experiences of MOOCs may lead to high drop rates. After gaining a better understanding of this, it is important to confirm results from qualitative study by using quantitative method.

Besides, to date the majority of MOOC research focuses on understanding student learning experiences (Clow 2013, Siemens. 2010, Kizilcec & Schneider. 2015), and on enhancing teaching practices to best serve students’ needs (Zheng et al. 2015a). Surprisingly, little attention has been given to MOOC instructors, who play a significant role in making MOOCs happen. Thus, it is essential to understand MOOC instructors’ experiences, their motivations to teach within this novel learning format, their associated challenges, and how they deal with these challenges, so that we, as researchers and designers, can help them more effectively teach MOOCs.

Also, current MOOC platforms are limited to playing videos, sending announcement, and hosting a discussion forum; there is little support for social activities (Zheng et al. 2015b). A vast body of literature regarding classroom learning and distance learning has shown the importance of forming a sense of community (Du et al. 2009), enhancing social interactions (Du et al. 2009), and encouraging collaborations (Zheng et al. 2015a) to improve student retention and program success. To cultivate an active learning environment, MOOC instructors have widely included a variety of external tools, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google plus, etc. into MOOCs (Zheng et al. 2015a, Zheng et al. 2016). However, these studies lack in presenting in-depth analyses of social media usage, the relationship of usage between a MOOC platform and social media and the rationales of the social media use from both instructors’ and students’ perspectives. Thus, there are not many insights that we could consider in order to provide design principles for the future MOOC platform and to help instructors and students better use social media to enhance engagement and retention.

Historically, MOOC designs have been of two different types: the connectivist MOOCs (cMOOC) applying the concepts of connectivist learning (e.g., an emphasis on connected, collaborative learning) (Daniel 2012, Siemens 2011, Siemens 2012); and content-based extended MOOCs (xMOOCs), which emphasize a more traditional learning approach by video presentations that are complemented by short quizzes and other testing (Daniel 2012, Siemens 2011, Siemens 2012, Yuan et al. 2013). Here I focus particularly on the more recent xMOOCs, as this is the style of MOOC that has grown so tremendously in scale and variety, gaining significant attention by students and institution, but without a solid understanding of the user experience and factors influencing retention and outcomes.

I carried out an in-depth interview study to investigate key student motivations and activity patterns for MOOCs, including the ways that students use MOOCs and the reasons they offer for not finishing. Because of the importance of instructors in MOOCs, I also conducted interviews with instructors in different universities to understand their teaching process, motivation and challenges in MOOCs. Moreover, I explored the use of online social networks during learning and teaching MOOC from both students and instructors perspectives using mixed methods given the limitations of MOOC platform and wide usage of OSN in MOOCs. These results offer a solid understanding of students and instructors’ needs, as well as the limitations of current MOOC platforms and policies. I use this richer understanding to identify and propose instructional and platform design implications based on scenario-based design framework (Carroll, 2000) for the next generation of MOOCs. (Scenario-based design embraces an evolutionary development paradigm, which requires designers to consider users’ need and problems in every design stage and use them to guide the next design stage. I document learners’ needs and problems based on my prior studies and propose design suggestion by creating user interaction scenarios and claims.)

1.2 Research Focus

In this thesis, I address a series of explanatory research questions, examining MOOCs as an important emerging context for online education, but also for social interaction more generally: Why do students register for MOOCs? What do they expect? What do they do in MOOCs? How do they leverage the MOOC social ecosystem to fulfill their various purposes? What do they experience in MOOCs and as outcomes of MOOCs? The goal is to develop an evidenced-based design analysis of MOOCs (Carroll et al. 2011, 2013). Both as online education tools, and as platforms for online social interactions and joint activity, MOOCs are in still in the primitive stage. I also develop a design framework for the next generation of MOOCs.

The goals of my dissertation are to (1) identify patterns of motivation, affect and activity among MOOC students through an interview study, including causes of withdrawal or failure to complete MOOCs; (2) quantify and compare student engagement on both OSN and MOOC platform through log analysis studies; (3) articulate strategies, including new platform and course designs, to enhance student retention and to increase the proportion of students who finish

MOOCs.

Specifically, I want to answer following research questions:

R1: What are the motivations, perception and behaviors patterns for learners to register for a particular course?

R2. What motivations and challenges that instructors face during teaching MOOCs?  R3. What learning patterns do MOOC learners demonstrate in OSN and MOOC platform and why?

R4. What factors affect user retention?

R5. How might design changes improve MOOC learning experiences and outcomes?

1.3 Contribution

This thesis makes several important contributions: 1) being the first study to redefine “retention” in the context of MOOCs by decomposing MOOC student unique motivations, various behavior patterns and divers reason of low retention, which is significant to guide largescale learning analytics and future platform design; 2) being the first study to redefine “teaching” in the context of MOOCs by fully demonstrating instructors teaching process, motivations and challenges, which is crucial to understand instructors real needs and provide them corresponding support  efficiently and effectively to avoid low quality teaching and instructors’ turn over; 3) being the first study to compare student engagement between MOOC platform and OSN official account of the MOOC using mixed methods and present the rationales from both students and instructors perspective, which shows the importance of building learning community and supporting collaborative learning in MOOCs and demonstrates how the design MOOC platform should improve to enhance student engagement and retention; 4) proposing design framework based on prior study and design literature by using scenario-based design method, which clearly identify the design problem and space for future MOOCs and also provide the relational and tradeoff of each design idea.

1.4 Thesis Overview

Chapter 2 reviews the extant literature on MOOCs, retention and socialization.

The main part of the thesis includes four MOOC retention studies. These chapters span students’ and instructor’s motivation, perceptions, challenges, behaviors and design solutions for next generation of MOOCs.

  • Chapter 3 presents MOOC students learning experiences and behaviors. Specifically, it focuses on students’ motivation to join MOOCs, their learning patterns and reasons to drop out of the course. This work redefines the concept of “retention” in the MOOC world.
  • Chapter 4 presents MOOC instructor’s teaching process, motivation and

challenges they have experiences.  This chapter unpacks the unique teaching process in MOOCs and redefine the “teaching” in the MOOC world

  • Chapter 5 presents the role of online social network in MOOCs. Specifically, it compares the engagement of students in Facebook and Coursera and also gains students and instructors viewpoints towards using Facebook and Coursera during learning/teaching in MOOCs.
  • Chapter 6 presents the design framework for next generation MOOCs based on the MOOC and design literature using Scenario Based design.

Chapter 7 summarizes theoretical and practical contribution and implications from the above studies.

Finally, Chapter 8 reviews the contributions of the thesis.

OCCUPY MOOCs: UNDERSTANDING USERS’ MOTIVATIONS, PERCEPTIONS,  AND ACTIVITY TRAJECTORIES

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