Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses
[Philip Lelyveld comment: the take-away is that there is a clear demand for MOOCs, but their design needs improvement. Watch for MOOC 2.0 in the near future.]
Not only does student participation decline dramatically throughout the new generation of web-based courses but the involvement of teachers in online discussions makes it worse.
Only about half of the students who registered ever viewed a lecture and only 4 per cent completed a course.
...studied the behaviour in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs).
Brinton and co say that posts fall into three categories. The first is small talk, student introductions and the like, that are of little use in completing the course. The second is about course logistics such as when to file homework. And the final category is course-specific questions which are the most useful for students.
...one potential avenue is to improve the learning experience by making the most valuable posts in discussions more easy to find.