Data Mining and Learning Analytics

CHAPTER 11 MINING LEARNING SEQUENCES IN MOOCs: DOES COURSE DESIGN CONSTRAIN STUDENTS’ BEHAVIORS OR DO STUDENTS SHAPE THEIR OWN LEARNING?

Lorenzo Vigentini, Simon McIntyre, Negin Mirriahi, and Dennis Alonzo

Learning & Teaching Unit & School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

11.1 INTRODUCTION

In recent years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become the center of much media hype and have been considered to be disruptive and transformational to traditional education practice (van den Berg & Crawley, 2013; Parr, 2014). The focus has been on a few characteristics of the MOOCs, namely, that they are free, consist of very large numbers of students, have low retention rates, and that their quality relies implicitly on the status of the institutions delivering them. However, as these factors challenge the usual perception of what constitutes a university course, a rapidly growing volume of research has started to question the effectiveness of pedagogies being used in MOOCs and their value for learning.

Although this distinction has been challenged (Lukeš, 2012; Conole, 2014), there are two well recognized types of MOOCs: cMOOCs (Siemens, 2005)—or connectivist MOOCs—focusing upon community and peer interaction, and xMOOCs (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010; Rodriguez, 2012), normally content and knowledge‐driven courses, often using automation of activities in order to accommodate large number of students.

Certainly, ...