One of the striking differences between MOOCs and previous innovations in the education technology field is the unprecedented interest and involvement of the general public. As MOOCs address pressing problems in higher education and the broader educational practice, awareness of the general public debate around MOOCs is essential. Understanding the public discourse around MOOCs can provide insi...

The four-week Business Start-up Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is the first MOOC designed at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), Calgary, Canada. This work in progress paper discusses the author’s experience designing the course through digital storytelling in partnership with seven successful Canadian entrepreneurs using powerful digital tools, including 2D whiteboard video...

Purpose MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have gained popularity for e-learning purposes. Effectiveness depends on platform interface design and management which should create student cohesiveness and optimize collaboration. Design/methodology/approach A MOOC prototype is developed and E-learning applications pilot-tested for one semester with French business school graduate students. Finding...

Identifying and understanding the motivations of student leaders from Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) discussion forums provides the key to making the online learning environment engaging, collaborative, and instructive. In this paper, we propose to identify student leaders solely based on textual features, or specifically by analyzing how they influence other students’ language. We propose...

MOOCs have the potential to benefit from the large number of very diverse learners that participate in courses, but this requires a principled approach to MOOC curriculum development. Courses need to take into consideration the diversity of learner experience and intentions, and incorporate scripts that both benefit from the large numbers of learners (crowd-sourcing), as well as enabling small-...

This study examined the utility of the concept of expressive aesthetics by testing websites that did or did not match this concept. A website scoring highly on this concept was created and was then compared to websites that either was non-aesthetic or corresponded to the concept of classical aesthetics. 60 website users of a broad age range (18 60 yrs) were allocated to three experimental group...

While the problem of image aesthetics has been well explored, the study of 3D shape aesthetics has focused on specific manually defined features. In this paper, we learn an aesthetics measure for 3D shapes autonomously from raw voxel data and without manually-crafted features by leveraging the strength of deep learning. We collect data from humans on their aesthetics preferences for various 3D ...

This policy paper addresses organizational areas for improvement when universities start producing MOOCs. These areas surface in the intersection between educational practice and MOOC policies, and they will be discussed in three parts in the paper. First, we describe the organizational context in which this paper is based. Second, we outline four organizational challenges that can shape the co...

The opportunity that Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) offer for cost effective massification of learning has generated significant interest from governments, higher education institutions (HEI) and commercial organisations. A growing number of HEI have been involved in experimenting with MOOCs for the purposes of expanding access, marketing and branding, as well as the potential of developin...