Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Ryan, R.M., Deci, E.L.: Toward a social psychology of assimilation: self-determination theory in cognitive. In: Self-Regulation and Autonomy: Social and Developmental Dimensions of Human Conduct, p. 191. Cambridge University Press (2013)
Almeda, M.V., Zuech, J., Utz, C., Higgins, G., Reynolds, R., Baker, R.S.: Comparing the factors that predict completion and grades among for-credit and Open/MOOC students in online learning. Online Learn. 22, 1–18 (2018)
Clow, D.: MOOCs and the funnel of participation. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, pp. 185–189. ACM, New York (2013)
Wilcox, P., Winn, S., Fyvie-Gauld, M.: “It Was Nothing to Do with the University, It Was Just the People”: The role of social support in the first-year experience of higher education. Stud. High. Educ. 30, 707–722 (2005)
Croft, N., Dalton, A., Grant, M.: Overcoming isolation in distance learning: building a learning community through time and space. J. Educ. Built Environ. 5, 27–64 (2010)
Yang, D., Wen, M., Rosé, C.P.: Peer influence on attrition in massive open online courses. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining, London, UK, pp. 405–406 (2014)
Labarthe, H., Bouchet, F., Bachelet, R., Yacef, K.: Does a peer recommender foster students’ engagement in MOOCs? In: Barnes, T., Chi, M., and Feng, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, Raleigh, NC, USA, pp. 418–423 (2016)
Potts, B.A., Khosravi, H., Reidsema, C., Bakharia, A., Belonogoff, M., Fleming, M.: Reciprocal peer recommendation for learning purposes. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, pp. 226–235. ACM, New York (2018)
Biancani, S., McFarland, D.: Social networks research in higher education. Educ. Stud. 85–126 (2013). https://doi.org/10.17323/1814-9545-2013-4-85-126
Poquet, O., Dawson, S.: Untangling MOOC learner networks. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, pp. 208–212. ACM, New York (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bouchet, F., Bachelet, R. (2019). Socializing on MOOCs: Comparing University and Self-enrolled Students. In: Calise, M., Delgado Kloos, C., Reich, J., Ruiperez-Valiente, J., Wirsing, M. (eds) Digital Education: At the MOOC Crossroads Where the Interests of Academia and Business Converge. EMOOCs 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11475. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19875-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19875-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19874-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19875-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)