Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are the road that led to a revolution and a new era of learning environments. Educational institutions have come under pressure to adopt new models that assure openness in their education distribution. Nonetheless, there is still altercation about the pedagogical approach and the absolute information delivery to the students. On the other side with the use of...

Die manuelle Bewertung von offenen Aufgaben, insbesondere Freitextaufgaben, ist für Lehrende zeitaufwändig und unterliegt Schwankungen durch subjektive Einschätzungen. Besonders im Hinblick auf aktuelle Entwicklungen wie Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), bei denen sich zehntausende Studierende für OnlineVorlesungen einschreiben, ist formatives Assessment ohne Automatisierung der Bewertung unm...

This paper explores the methodological approaches most commonly adopted in the scholarly literature on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), published during the period January 2008 May 2014. In order to identify trends, gaps and criticalities related to the methodological approaches of this emerging field of research, we analyzed 60 papers selected across four relevant scientific databases plus...

Student essays provide rich information about the students’ knowledge gain and the writing skills acquired. However, hand-scoring is time consuming and does not lend well to large-scale data analyses. Automated scoring of the writing allows monitoring and feedback for individual students as well as tracking changes in performance at district and state levels. We describe an operational implemen...

We report on educators’ experiences of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) focussed on the ‘Carpe Diem’ learning design process. The MOOC was developed in-house using Blackboard CourseSites by a university innovation and development unit, Learning Transformations, at Swinburne University Technology in Melbourne, Australia. We propose the potential of MOOCs as an opportunity to expose university...

In this paper, we model conversational roles in terms of distributions of turn level behaviors, including conversation acts and stylistic markers, as they occur over the whole interaction. This work presents a lightly supervised approach to inducing role definitions over sets of contributions within an extended interaction, where the supervision comes in the form of an outcome measure from the ...

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...

A key challenge in online learning is keeping students motivated. We report an experiment that added motivational messages to students solving mathematics problems on the KhanAcademy.org platform. By simply adding sentences above the text of a math problem, students attempted (successfully) a greater number of problems, were more likely to acquire exercise proficiencies, and even solved a large...

This paper discusses self-reported emotions experienced by students in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) learning context. Emotions have been previously shown to be related to learning in classrooms and laboratory studies and have even been leveraged to improve learning. In this study, frequently occurring discrete emotions as well as frequently, co-occurring pairs of emotions were analyzed d...