Implications for MOOC teaching and learning

This study has important implications for MOOC teaching and learning. First, the fact that most forum participants did not improve their interaction over time raises a critical question about the value of MOOC forums and how they can be redesigned to better support learning. Using discussion forums to support learning has been a focus of MOOC design efforts over the past several years. One strategy is to optimize forum usability and assist learners to locate useful information and people. These efforts range from the design of basic interface features such as keyword search and post ranking system to more complex designs, such as content-based discussion classifiers (e.g., Cui, Jin, & Wise, 2016) and question recommendation systems (e.g., Yang, Adamson, & Rosé, 2014). These efforts can potentially mitigate some challenges that hamper MOOC

learners from successfully accessing the knowledge and perspectives shared by other participants. Another strategy draws from the experience of group discussion in formal educational environments and introduces small group and collaborative discussion into MOOCs (Wen et al., 2015; Wichmann et al., 2016; Zheng, Vogelsang, & Pinkwart, 2015). This approach integrates forum discussion activities into the overall learning design. By designing group projects, tasks, and roles, it anchors forum interaction with clearly defined group goals and group boundaries. This strategy can potentially alleviate the problems causes by information overload and constantly changing discussants. Small group discussion environments also have the potential to help group members build stronger social bonding through repeated interactions. In complement to these existing approaches, the current study leads to the proposal of a different strategy. That is one that focuses on the development of MOOC learners to become more competent forum participants who can make efficient use of the resources in the massive and open discussion forums while consciously overcoming the challenges. As discussed in the earlier sections in this chapter, this can be done through diagnosing learners’ position trajectories and providing customized learning support, such as guiding them to adopt deeper approaches to the discussion content, participate across multiple discussions, and engage in extended interactions with the same peers. Moreover, the information about learners’ positions and position trajectories can be provided to the learners to assist them understanding and regulating their own learning (Wise et al., 2013). Through innovatively aggregating these approaches, it may be possible for the MOOC community to be more successful in supporting MOOC learners to reap the benefit of studying in the world classroom.

A second implication of this work for MOOC teaching and learning comes from the finding that learners mostly had weak ties in their ego network, indicating the need to design forum activities to strengthen social connections. Strong social connections and cohesive learning communities are considered promising for alleviating the high dropout rate and the lack of social learning environment in MOOCs (Brown et al., 2015; Rosé et al., 2014). The active participants in MOOC forums (e.g., instructors, TAs, active

learners) are often considered important figures in the social networks (Jiang et al., 2015; Poquet & Dawson, 2016). But as seen in the enthusiastic central contributors, even the active and well-connected learners only developed strong ties with a small proportion of people that they interacted with. Thus their impact on facilitating broad

social bonding among forum participants should be estimated accordingly. In contrast, learning design for forum discussion can be promising for promoting stronger social ties more broadly (Kellogg et al., 2014; Wise & Cui, 2018a). Discussion activities can be designed to encourage repeated interactions with the same peers through various means, such as quiz questions and assignments that can incur in-depth and extended conversations, designated discussions on different topics that lead learners to participate with the same people across conversations, and small group projects that require

learners to interact intensively with the same peers for a prolonged period of time (Wen et al., 2015; Zheng, Vogelsang, & Pinkwart, 2015). In addition to learning design, the instructional team can purposefully guide learners to have extended interactions with each other. Wise and Cui (2018a) found the strength of learner-learner connections in a content-oriented discussion network was associated with the instructor’s facilitation style: stronger learner-learner connections were found in the community with an instructor who guided learner to work out the answers themselves than in the community with an instructor who usually provided straightforward answers.

A third implication of the work is that participation positions identified in this study can inform forum facilitation and learning design. Learners with different positions can be engaged to help support different types of emergent learning needs in discussion

forums. For instance, the enthusiastic central providers can transmit knowledge and resources to a broad range of peers. Engaging these learners as “community TAs” may improve responsiveness in the discussion forum. At the same time, there is also value in engaging the deep thinkers to help facilitate forum interactions. While they model the deep and complex approaches to the discussion content, the instructional team can focus on guiding and scaffolding other learners to pick up these approaches. Moreover, learners’ positions can be useful for organizing discussion activities. For instance, small group collaboration is considered to be a promising learning design format for MOOCs (Goggins et al., 2016; Tawfik et al., 2017; Wen e al, 2015). Zheng, Vogelsang, and Pinkwart (2015) noted grouping solutions designed based on learner characteristics were more likely to lead to better retention rate and learning performance than random grouping solutions in small group collaboration in MOOCs. As learner’s position profiles include multiple participation characteristics related to how learners interact in relation to each other, they can provide useful information for the grouping solutions.