Disciplinary Differences Manifested through NTU MOOCs Forums: A Community of Inquiry Perspective
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Ko, Chun-Ru
Abstract
In 2012, the launch of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platforms Udacity, Coursera and edX prompted leading universities such as Stanford, MIT, and Harvard to immediately offer MOOCs. According to the MOOCs accumulator Class Central, the cumulative number of MOOCs will total nearly 4000 by 2016. These free online courses, from different disciplines and taught in several languages, can reduce the cost of higher education and improve teaching by combining education with Connectivism, the Flipped Classroom, and Learning Analytics. However, MOOCs face a serious problem of the low completion rate. Researchers have conducted studies on MOOCs learners’ behaviors to remedy this issue, and have found that those who complete MOOCs courses tend to actively participate in the forums. Under the assumption that forum interactions positively impact the MOOCs learning experience, this study has adopted the “Community of Inquiry” theoretical framework to analyze messages in MOOCs forums. This researcher will observe how social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence are presented in MOOCs forums, making recommendations to MOOCs teaching teams and platform designers accordingly. Because most MOOCs forum research studies have focused on one course and are aimed at western learners, their results may not be applicable to all disciplines and Chinese learners. Therefore, this study quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes the content of four Chinese MOOCs offered on Coursera by National Taiwan University: “Professionalism,” “Red Chamber Dream 1,” “Engineering Graphics,” and “Basic Optical 1.” By presenting the disciplinary differences and interaction characteristics of Chinese learners, this study will be able to make specific recommendations to Chinese MOOCs teaching teams in different disciplines. This researcher finds significant differences between the categories of social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence in the four sampled Chinese MOOCs. Soft subject students (students in disciplines that lack a fixed paradigm) are encouraged to make different interpretations and are therefore present more in the “Interpersonal Communication” category of social presence, “Exploration” stage of cognitive presence, and “Direct Instruction” category of teaching presence. Hard subject learners (students in disciplines that have a fixed paradigm) depend on accumulative knowledge and accordingly are present more in the “Open Communication” category of social presence and “Triggering Event” stage of cognitive presence. Applied subject (where application of knowledge is heavily emphasized) students are present more in the “Interpersonal Communication” category of social presence and “Resolution” stage of cognitive presence, while pure subject (where application of knowledge is less heavily emphasized) learners are present more in the “Exploration” stage of cognitive presence. In addition to these disciplinary differences, the characteristics of MOOCs also impacts how these students develop their presence in the forums. The diverse background of MOOCs learners may lead to new dialogues that increase social presence and teaching presence. The multiple learning paths available to these students—such as delayed course takers, early course takers, no follow-up learners, and synchronous communicators—may cause more self-exposure in the forums. Finally, MOOCs learners learn to bump messages and change thread topics to solve communication problems caused by the presence of large-scale participation, which may also increase their social presence. Additionally, the design of the MOOCs assessment system and forums will also lead to more conversations that enhance the quality and quantity of the cognitive presence and teaching presence. Adopting peer assessment will lead to MOOCs learners discussing the following in the forums: technical problems, controversies over scoring, practices of rubrics, and reflections on assignment design. Students also are more likely to share assignments, respond to reviewers’ opinions, and hold learning activities in the forums. However, the automatic grading system not only triggers discussions about system errors or bugs, but also leads to MOOCs learners considering the possibility of cheating. As for the function of MOOCs forums, the voting system provides an important way to express opinion even though tagging other learners and anonymous discussions are not beneficial for the social presence. Besides these results, this study identified Chinese learners’ characteristics that impact forum presence development: respecting their professors, paying attention to non-verbal expressions, and avoiding conflicts, and developed a message topic classification table based on the MOOCs forums that can refer to a specific presence. Subsequent research can adopt these recommendations to optimize the Community of Inquiry theoretical framework.
Subjects
MOOC
Community of Inquiry
Presence
Disciplinary Difference
Peer-Learning
Chinese Learner
Content Analysis
Type
thesis
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