Learning Alone Yet Together: Enhancing Between-Learner Social Connectivity at Scale

MOOCs rely on asynchronous sessions to meet the individual need of a massive number of students geographically distributed. While the asynchronous design ensures the flexibility and accessibility of delivering courses at scale, the absence of synchronous opportunities brings up problems such as reduced interactivity and even the sense of isolation. However, as synchronicity in essence contradicts the asynchronous design which is considered to foster the fundamental appeal of MOOCs, adding synchronous parts to MOOCs in a simple and straightforward way is not feasible. To address this, an emerging functionality which is popular in entertainment video watching but newly used in MOOC learning is explored and evaluated. In this functionality, the lecture video and communication between learners are still implemented in an asynchronous way whereas the chat messages sent by previous and present learners in the process of watching are organized and displayed according to their sending timestamps along the video playback timeline to create an atmosphere of 'pseudo-synchronicity'. This study first evaluated the effect of this new design on learner interaction and compared the results with learners' use of the traditional discussion posts which served as the baseline of affording learning connectivity here. Then the findings were contrasted and consolidated with the feedback from learners in a survey. Preliminary results show that despite the difficulty in translating the temporary learning connections into deeper social relationships, this new system can effectively deliver the sense of connectedness to learners in their MOOC learning process.