Are MOOC forums changing?

Abstract

There has been a growing trend in higher education towards increased use and adoption of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Despite this interest in learning at scale, limited work has compared MOOC activity across subsequent course offerings. In this study, we explore forum activity in ten iterations of the same MOOC. Our results suggest that participation in MOOC forums has changed over the past four years of delivery. First, overall participation in MOOC forums have decreased. Second, in later iterations cohorts of more committed forum users start to resemble formal online courses in size (67>n>36). However, despite the smaller groups of learners that should find it easier to form connections with one another, our analysis did not reveal the expected increase in the quality of social activity. Instead, MOOC forums evolved into smaller on-task question and answer (Q&A) spaces, not capitalizing on the opportunities for social learning. We discuss practical and research implications of such changes.