Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are seen as a next step in distance online learning. In the MOOC vision, large numbers of students can access the course content over the Internet and complete courses at their own pace while interacting with their peers and instructors online. Despite the initial enthusiasm about MOOCs, large number of students were observed dropping out of the online courses. In this paper, we pinpoint the reasons behind the high student dropout rate and discuss how the interaction capabilities of MOOCs contributed towards the low completion rate.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are rather new learning platforms in higher education. The idea of MOOCs is to make education freely available for anyone with an internet access in the form of free online courses. For example, a MOOC may consist of online video lectures, various types of assessments, and a discussion forum. Proponents of MOOCs claim that they will revolutionize the higher education by means of offering courses by the world leading experts for anyone willing to participate.
While top universities are behind several MOOCs, the courses may not belong to the curricula of the university students. The universities do not provide credits for all participants who complete the course, but the MOOC providers may grant their own certificates. However, the American Council on Education, an organization representing over 1800 colleges and universities, has recommended college credits to be granted for completing certain MOOCs (Ebben and Murphy, 2014). In Finland, the University of Helsinki offers a possibility to get university credits and to gain the right to study computer science in the university for students who successfully complete their “Introduction to Programming” MOOCs (Programming MOOC 2018).
The term “MOOC” was first used in connection with a course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba in 2008, which had 2200 registered online students (Fini, 2009 ;Mackness et al., 2010). In 2011 professors Norvig and Thrun from the Stanford University attracted over 160 000 registered students from over 190 countries in their Introduction to AI course (Rodrigues, 2012). This truly massive course (in terms of number of students) led Thrun to inaugurate Udacity and its business model. A MOOC hype was quickly launched, and several commercial and nonprofit organizations started to offer MOOCs on various topics. In fact, The New York Times even declared 2012 as “The Year Of the MOOC” (Pappano, 2012). As of today, the notable providers of MOOCs include Coursera, edX, Udacity and others.
The massive amount of students and openness to everyone leads to a huge diversity of the course participants, including the motivations behind the course registration, and creates challenges in pedagogical practices and interaction. A feature distinguishing MOOCs from traditional university courses is the large number of “dropout” students, who register for the course but do not complete it.
Because MOOCs are a relatively new form of education, also MOOC research is still emerging. For example, in 2014 Ebben and Murphy (2014) were able to identify only 25 peer-reviewed scientific articles about MOOCs, the first one published in 2008. The fast evolution of the field is reflected by the fact that the authors already divided the only six years and 25 papers long history of MOOC research into two distinct phases, the cMOOC and the xMOOC phase (see definitions below). Two years later, Veletsianos and Shepherdson (2016) were able to identify 183 papers published in 2013-2015.
The focus of this study is to find out the reasons for high dropout rate in MOOC courses and to see how the interaction capabilities of MOOC course execution had a role. Hoy (2014, pp. 85-86) defines MOOC as “an online course that anyone can participate, usually free of charge. MOOCs are made of short video lectures combined with automatically graded tests and online forums where participants can discuss the material or get help”. While all MOOCs share the idea of free online access for anyone with a computer and a network connection available, there are some significant differences on how the courses are arranged. To this end, MOOCs are often categorized into cMOOCs and xMOOCs. Connectivist (or constructivist) MOOCs (cMOOCs) are built on human agency, user participation and creativity via connections provided by online technologies (Ebben and Murphy, 2014). Extended MOOCs (xMOOCs) have more traditional course structure as they are content-based and centralized (Margaryan et al., 2015).
The very first MOOC, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008 (later “CCK08”) course was a cMOOC, based on the theory of connectivism by the course organizers (Siemens, 2005 ;Downes, 2012). Their intention was to enable the participants to both engage with the theory of connectivism and to experience its principles in practice (Mackness, 2010). The theory of connectivism emphasizes that learning occurs in networks rather than by individuals. According to Downes (2012, p. 9), “Connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks”. A variety of technological tools for interacting with other students were used in CCK08. While participation required only blog and concept maps, more than 12 different tools (such as mailing list, Moodle, Wiki pages, web conferencing and social medi
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