Abstract
There is an emerging trend in higher education for the adoption of massive open online courses (MOOCs). However,despite this interest in learning at scale, there has been limited work investigating how MOOC participants have changed over time. In this study, we explore the temporal changes in MOOC learners’ language and discourse characteristics.In particular, we demonstrate that there is a clear trend within a course for language in discussion forums to be of both more on-topic and reflective of deep learning in subsequent offerings of a course. We measure this in two ways, and demonstrate this trend through several repeated analyses of different courses in different domains. While not all courses show an increase beyond statistical significance,the majority do, providing evidence that MOOC learner populations are changing as the educational phenomena matures.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | L@S '17 Proceedings of the Fourth (2017) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale |
Place of Publication | New York |
Publisher | ACM Press |
Pages | 283-286 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4503-4450-0 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 12 Apr 2017 |
Event | Fourth (2017) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale - Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Duration: 20 Apr 2017 → 21 Apr 2017 http://learningatscale.acm.org/las2017/ |
Conference
Conference | Fourth (2017) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale |
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Abbreviated title | L@S '17 |
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Cambridge, Massachusetts |
Period | 20/04/17 → 21/04/17 |
Internet address |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- learning analytics
- MOOCs
- learning at scale
- discourse complexity
- data science
- discussion forums
- on-topic discussion