How a MOOC can effectively facilitate student transitions to an online distance postgraduate programme

How can Gamification Improve MOOC Student Engagement?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) require students’ motivation either intrinsically or extrinsically to complete any of its courses. Even though MOOCs enjoy great popularity and bring many benefits to the educational community, some concerns arise with MOOC advancement. In fact, MOOCs are affected by low completion rate and face issues with respect to interactivity and student engagement alon...

How to Facilitate Social Contagion?

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals has proven to be a real challenge. Providing evidence on cost-effective interventions did not prove to be sufficient to secure the trust of national authorities, health care providers and patients. Introducing change in a health system requires a good understanding of the relationships between the actors of the system. Social network analysis can provi...

How can educational technology facilitate student engagement with online primary sources?: A user needs assessment

Can Social Contagion Help Global Health ‘Jump the Shark’?; Comment on “How to Facilitate Social Contagion?”

The instrumental use of social networks has become a central tenet of international health policy and advocacy since the Millennium project. In asking, ‘How to facilitate social contagion?’, Karl Blanchet of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine therefore reflects not only on the recent success, but also hints to growing challenges; the tactics of partnerships, alliances and platfo...

Mapping student engagement in a massive open online course (MOOC)

The massive open online course (MOOC) has appeared as an alternative form of distance instruction designed to scale to global audiences. Although a fair amount is known regarding who takes MOOCs, we know much less about the geography of MOOC student engagement beyond survey results that summarize students’ home countries. This paper characterizes spatial patterns of learner engagement in MOOCs ...