Supporting crowdsourcing in MOOC informal face-to-face meetings

MOOCs are currently one of the main buzzwords in education. These particular online courses are characterized by the openness of their contents, which are typically packaged in video format, and by the large number of participants. This large number of potential learners facilitates creating distributed communities with similar interests around the world that can physically meet periodically to share their thoughts, discuss about the MOOC topics and help students with problems to overcome the difficulties. These meetings are informal since they are outside the course schedule and MOOC teachers do not normally participate on them. Nevertheless, it could be of interest for MOOC teachers to offer a tentative structure that leads the face-toface discussions in these informal meetings, as well as to collect the main conclusions at the end, so that these conclusions can be the starting point in meetings held at other locations. This paper explains how this informal learning setting could leverage the advantages of using tags to connect MOOCs with face-to-face encounters and the tag-based authoring tool etiquetAR as the support for providing a structure for the discussions and collecting the conclusions of these meetings.