This paper presents a case study of integrating two external MOOCs in a face-to-face (f2f) summer course for high school students. The aim of the study is to explore the design challenges emerged from this blended learning approach, the students’ learning outcomes and satisfaction with the course content as well as investigating the students’ behavior with the MOOCs once the f2f course ended. R...

Instructor intervention in student discussion forums is a vital component in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), where personalized interaction is limited. This paper introduces the problem of predicting instructor interventions in MOOC forums. We propose several prediction models designed to capture unique aspects of MOOCs, combining course information, forum structure and posts content. Our ...

Despite the success of MOOCs to promote open leaning, they are usually criticized for their high drop-out rates and behaviorist pedagogical approach. Some active learning strategies, such as collaboration and gamification, have shown their potential to overcome some of these problems at low scale. However, the design and implementation of such strategies in MOOCs is still a challenge, which is ...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced rapid expansion and gained significant popularity among students and educators. Although the broad acceptance of MOOCs, there is still a long way to go in terms of satisfaction of students’ needs, as witnessed in the extremely high drop-out rates. Working toward improving MOOCs, we employ the Grounded Theory Method (GTM) in a quantitative stu...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are part of the lifelong learning experience of people worldwide. Many of these learners participate fully. However, the high levels of dropout on most of these courses are a cause for concern. Previous studies have suggested that there are patterns of engagement within MOOCs that vary according to the pedagogy employed. The current paper builds on this work ...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have generated enthusiasm, excitement, and hype worldwide and recently increasing skepticism. They are being broadly discussed in the major news media (and to a smaller extent in academic circles). Rapidly increasing numbers of MOOC providers, MOOC courses, and articles, discussion groups, and blogs discussing MOOCs are indicators of the involvement of many s...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a prominent mode of online education, but the quality of assessments in MOOCs remains inconsistent. There has been a consistent gap between the state of the art in assessment and the state of the practice in both MOOCs and other forms of educational technology. Improving the quality of assessment has the potential to improve their usefulness f...

In the last few years, the international work on Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCS) underlined new needs for open educational resources (OER) management within the context of the Web of Data. First, within MOOCs, all (or at least most) resources must be open and available on the Web through URIs, including the MOOCs themselves. Second the evolution of research and practice in the field of OER...

This paper explores the cognitive presence of the learners in MOOCs through using a (computational) linguistic analysis of the learners’ Point-of-View as an indicator for cognitive presence. The linguistic analysis of the written language as a medium of interaction by the students in the context of MOOCs shows hallmarks of cognitive disengagement and low cognitive presence

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become an accepted way to make learning opportunities available at large scale and with low cost to the learner. However, only if these are made accessible will they be able to offer flexibility of learning and benefits to all, irrespective of disability. Experience in providing accessible online learning at distance universities suggests that this can b...