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Refocusing the lens on engagement in MOOCs

Published: 26 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) continue to see increasing enrollment and adoption by universities, although they are still not fully understood and could perhaps be significantly improved. For example, little is known about the relationships between the ways in which students choose to use MOOCs (e.g., sampling lecture videos, discussing topics with fellow students) and their overall level of engagement with the course, although these relationships are likely key to effective course implementation. In this paper we propose a multilevel definition of student engagement with MOOCs and explore the connections between engagement and students' behaviors across five unique courses. We modeled engagement using ordinal penalized logistic regression with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), and found several predictors of engagement that were consistent across courses. In particular, we found that discussion activities (e.g., viewing forum posts) were positively related to engagement, whereas other types of student behaviors (e.g., attempting quizzes) were consistently related to less engagement with the course. Finally, we discuss implications of unexpected findings that replicated across courses, future work to explore these implications, and relevance of our findings for MOOC course design.

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  • (2023)Engagement Detection and Its Applications in Learning: A Tutorial and Selective ReviewProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2023.3309560111:10(1398-1422)Online publication date: Oct-2023
  • (2023)The effects of learners’ background and social network position on content-related MOOC interactionEducational technology research and development10.1007/s11423-023-10221-471:3(973-990)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Kitlesel Açık Çevrimiçi Ders Ortamlarında Öğrenci KatılımıÖğretim Teknolojisi ve Hayat Boyu Öğrenme Dergisi - Instructional Technology and Lifelong Learning10.52911/itall.1194260Online publication date: 11-Dec-2022
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cover image ACM Other conferences
L@S '18: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale
June 2018
391 pages
ISBN:9781450358866
DOI:10.1145/3231644
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 June 2018

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Author Tags

  1. MOOCs
  2. course persistence
  3. engagement patterns

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L@S '18
L@S '18: Fifth (2018) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
June 26 - 28, 2018
London, United Kingdom

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L@S '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 58 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Engagement Detection and Its Applications in Learning: A Tutorial and Selective ReviewProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2023.3309560111:10(1398-1422)Online publication date: Oct-2023
  • (2023)The effects of learners’ background and social network position on content-related MOOC interactionEducational technology research and development10.1007/s11423-023-10221-471:3(973-990)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Kitlesel Açık Çevrimiçi Ders Ortamlarında Öğrenci KatılımıÖğretim Teknolojisi ve Hayat Boyu Öğrenme Dergisi - Instructional Technology and Lifelong Learning10.52911/itall.1194260Online publication date: 11-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Exploring Behavioral Patterns for Data-Driven Modeling of Learners' Individual DifferencesFrontiers in Artificial Intelligence10.3389/frai.2022.8073205Online publication date: 15-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Learning Alone Yet Together: Enhancing Between-Learner Social Connectivity at ScaleProceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3491140.3528294(374-378)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Automated detection of emotional and cognitive engagement in MOOC discussions to predict learning achievementComputers & Education10.1016/j.compedu.2022.104461181:COnline publication date: 1-May-2022
  • (2021)Data-Driven Modeling of Learners’ Individual Differences for Predicting Engagement and Success in Online LearningProceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3450613.3456834(201-212)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2021
  • (2021)Characterising Student Engagement Modes through Low-Level Activity PatternsProceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3450613.3456818(88-97)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2021
  • (2021)A Multidisciplinary Approach To Designing Immersive Gameplay Elements for Learning Standard-Based Educational ContentExtended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3450337.3483467(67-73)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
  • (2021)Modeling Consistency Using Engagement Patterns in Online CoursesLAK21: 11th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference10.1145/3448139.3448161(226-236)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2021
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