skip to main content
10.1145/2818048.2820082acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescscwConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Ask the Instructors: Motivations and Challenges of Teaching Massive Open Online Courses

Published: 27 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced rapid growth and attracted significant attention within aca-demia. However, despite widespread acceptance of MOOCs as a unique opportunity to transform educational practices, many questions remain regarding their sustainability, given the high dropout rates and challenges related to collabora-tive learning support [12]. Recent research has attempted to address these concerns by analyzing students' MOOC expe-riences and how MOOCs may fall short in meeting students' learning needs [41]. However, very little research has approached the problem from an instructor perspective. We report an interview study of 14 MOOC instructors in which we used grounded theory to uncover the complex processes, motivations, and challenges associated with teaching a MOOC. A key finding is that we should provide support through the whole instruction process. By enhancing sup-port for instructors and their MOOC collaborators, we may improve outcomes for all MOOC stakeholders, including students.

References

[1]
Anant Agarwal. 2012. 'Circuits and Electronics', MITx. Chronicle of Higher Education, 59(6), B10.
[2]
Gad Allon. 2012. 'Operations Management', Udemy. Chronicle of Higher Education, 59(6), B10–11.
[3]
Linda Argote. 1982. Input uncertainty and organizational coordination in hospital emergency units. Administrative science quarterly, 420-434.
[4]
Yvonne Belanger & Jessica Thornton. 2013. Bioelectricity: A quantitative approach. Retrieved on May 7 from http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/ 10161/6216/Duke_Bioelectricity_MOOC_Fall2012.pdf
[5]
Lori Breslow, David Pritchard, Jennifer DeBoer, Glenda S. Stump, Andrew D. & Daniel T. Seatoon. 2013. Studying learning in the worldwide classroom. Research into edX's first MOOC. Research & Practice in Assessment, 8, 13–25.
[6]
John M. Carroll. 2004. Completing Design in Use: Closing the Appropriation Cycle, In Proc. of the ECIS.
[7]
John M. Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Gregorio Convert, & Graig H. Ganoe. 2006. Awareness and teamwork in computer-supported collaborations. Interacting with computers, 18(1), 21-46.
[8]
Doug Clow. 2013. MOOCs and the Funnel of Participa-tion, in: Proceedings of the Third International Confer-ence on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, pages 185-189.
[9]
Dave Cormier & George Siemens. 2010. The Open Course: Through the Open Door--Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement, Educause Review (45:4), pages 30-32.
[10]
Derrick Coetzee, Armando Fox, Marti A. Hearst, & Bjorn Hartmann. 2014. Should your MOOC forum use a reputation system? In Proc. CSCW 2014 (pp.11761187.
[11]
Juliet Corbin & Anselm Strauss. 2007. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Sage Publications, Incorporated.
[12]
John Daniel. 2012. Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility. Journal of Interactive Media in Education.
[13]
Paul Dourish, & Victoria Bellotti. (1992, December). Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work (pp. 107-114). ACM.
[14]
Mitchell Duneier. 2012. Teaching to the world from central New Jersey. Chronicle of Higher Education, 59(2), 24.
[15]
Armando Fox & Patterson Dean. 2012. Crossing the Software Education Chasm, Communications of the Acm (55:5) (pp. 44-49).
[16]
Keith Head. 2013. Massive open online adventure. Chronicle of Higher Education, 59(34), B24–25.
[17]
Khe Foon Hew, & Cheung Wing Sum. 2014. Students' and instructors' use of massive open online courses (MOOCs): Motivations and challenges. Educational Research Review, Volumn 12, pages 45-58.
[18]
Toru Iiyoshi, MS Vijay Kumar, and J. Seely Brown. 2008. Opening up Edu-cation: The Collective Advancement of Educa-tion through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. Mit Press.
[19]
René F Kizilcec, Chris Piech, & Emily Schneider. 2013. Deconstructing disengagement: analyzing learner subpopulations in massive open online courses. In Proceedings of the third international conference on learning analytics and knowledge, pages 170-179.
[20]
René F Kizilcec, & Emily Schneider. 2015. Motivation as a lens to understand online learners: Toward datadriven design with the OLEI scale. ACM Transac-tions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 22(2), 6.
[21]
Jeremy Knox, Siân Bayne, Hamish MacLeod, Jen Ross, & Christine Sinclair. 2012. MOOC Pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera. International Conference on Networked Learning 2010 (pp. 266– 275). University of Lancaster: Lancaster.
[22]
Steve Kolowich. 2013. The professors who make the MOOCs. Chronicle of Higher Education, 59(28), A20– A23.
[23]
Jeremy Knox, Siân Bayne, Hamish MacLeod, Jen Ross, & Christine Sinclair. 2012. MOOC Pedagogy: the challenges of de-veloping for Coursera. International Conference on Networked Learning 2010 (pp. 266–275). University of Lancaster: Lancaster.
[24]
Apostolos Koutropoulos, Michael Sean Gallagher, Sean C. Abajian, Inge de Waard, Rebecca Joanne Hogue, Nilgun Ozdamar Keskin, & Osvaldo Rodriguez. 2012. Emotive Vocabulary in MOOCs: Context & Participant Retention. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 1.
[25]
Dalit Levy. 2011. Lessons learned from participating in a connectivist massive online open course (MOOC). In Proceedings of the Chais conference on instructional technologies research 2011: Learning in the technological era (pp. 31-36).
[26]
Jenny Mackness, Sui Mak, & Roy Williams. 2010. The ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC. In L. Dirckinck-Holmfeld et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning (pp. 266–275). University of Lancaster: Lancaster.
[27]
Alexander McAuley, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens, & Dave Cormier. 2010. The MOOC Model for Digital Practice. Re-trieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/MOOC_Final.pdf
[28]
Raul Medina-Mora, Terry Winograd, Rodrigo Flores, & Fernando Flores. (1992, December). The action workflow approach to workflow management technology. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work (pp. 281-288). ACM.
[29]
Sun Young Park, & Yunan Chen (2012, May). Adaptation as design: learning from an EMR deployment study. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 20972106). ACM.
[30]
Michael S. Roth. 2013. My Modern Experience Teaching a MOOC. Chronicle of Higher Education, 59(34), B18–21.
[31]
Daniel M Russell, Scott Klemmer, Armando Fox, Celine Latulipe, Mitchell Duneier, & Elizabeth Losh. 2013. Will Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) Change Education?, In Proc. CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2395-2398.
[32]
Susan Leigh Star, & Anselm Strauss. 1999. Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), 8(1-2), 9-30
[33]
Kjeld Schmidt, & Liam Bannon. 1992. Taking CSCW seriously. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1(1-2), 7-40.
[34]
Marvin E Shaw. 1964. M Communication networks. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.) Advances in experimental social psychology. New York: Academic Press (pp. 111-147).
[35]
Leif Singer, Fernando Figueira Filho, Brendan Cleary, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, & Kurt Schneider (2013, February). Mutual assessment in the social programmer ecosys-tem: an empirical investigation of developer profile aggregators. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 103-116). ACM.
[36]
George Siemens. 2011. The race to platform education. eLearnspace. http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/10/13/the-raceto-platform-education/accessed 2012-09-21
[37]
George Siemens. 2012. MOOCs are really a platform. eLearnspace. http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocsare-really-a-platform/accessed 2012-09-21
[38]
Lucy Suchman. 1995. Making work visible. Communications of the ACM, 38(9), 56-ff.
[39]
Haohan Wang, Yiwei Li, Xiaobo Hu, Yucong Yang, Zhu Meng, & Kai-min Chang. (2013, June). Using EEG to Improve Massive Open Online Courses Feedback Interaction. In AIED Workshops.
[40]
Li Yuan, Stephen Powell, & JISC CETIS. 2013. MOOCs and open education: Implications for higher education. Cetis White Paper.
[41]
Saijing Zheng, Mary Beth Rosson, Patrick C. Shih, & John M. Carroll. 2015. Understanding Student Motivation, Behaviors and Perceptions in MOOCs, In the Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
[42]
Saijing Zheng, Mary Beth Rosson, Patrick C. Shih & John M. Carroll. 2015. Designing Massive Open Online Courses as Interactive Places for Collaborative Learning. In the Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Learning at Scale.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)e-FeeD4Mi: human-centred design of personalised and contextualised feedback in MOOCsBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.2376201(1-18)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
  • (2023)FACULTY, STUDENTS, AND PARENTS SATISFACTION WITH FLEXIBLE LEARNING IMPLEMENTATION IN A STATE-FUNDED UNIVERSITYSprin Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences10.55559/sjahss.v2i02.862:02(19-41)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Investigation of instructors’ massive open online course experiences: Actions and outputsE-Learning and Digital Media10.1177/2042753023115617421:4(329-345)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2023
  • Show More Cited By
  1. Ask the Instructors: Motivations and Challenges of Teaching Massive Open Online Courses

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
    February 2016
    1866 pages
    ISBN:9781450335928
    DOI:10.1145/2818048
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 February 2016

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. MOOC instructors
    2. MOOCs
    3. Massive Open Online Courses
    4. challenges
    5. collaboration
    6. motivation
    7. online learning

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • Center for Online Innovation in Learning of PSU

    Conference

    CSCW '16
    Sponsor:
    CSCW '16: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
    February 27 - March 2, 2016
    California, San Francisco, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    CSCW '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 142 of 571 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

    Upcoming Conference

    CSCW '25

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)39
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
    Reflects downloads up to 01 Mar 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)e-FeeD4Mi: human-centred design of personalised and contextualised feedback in MOOCsBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.2376201(1-18)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
    • (2023)FACULTY, STUDENTS, AND PARENTS SATISFACTION WITH FLEXIBLE LEARNING IMPLEMENTATION IN A STATE-FUNDED UNIVERSITYSprin Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences10.55559/sjahss.v2i02.862:02(19-41)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
    • (2023)Investigation of instructors’ massive open online course experiences: Actions and outputsE-Learning and Digital Media10.1177/2042753023115617421:4(329-345)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2023
    • (2023)Delving into instructor‐led feedback interventions informed by learning analytics in massive open online coursesJournal of Computer Assisted Learning10.1111/jcal.1279939:4(1039-1060)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2023
    • (2022)Understanding Learners’ Perception of MOOCs Based on Review Data Analysis Using Deep Learning and Sentiment AnalysisFuture Internet10.3390/fi1408021814:8(218)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2022
    • (2022)Co-creation of a massive open online course: An exploration of the motives and motive fulfillment of a faculty member and student co-instructorsFrontiers in Education10.3389/feduc.2022.10100187Online publication date: 29-Sep-2022
    • (2022)Portraying the Performance of Indonesian’s Massive Open Online Course FacilitatorsSage Open10.1177/2158244022111660112:3Online publication date: 10-Aug-2022
    • (2022)Flexibility and Social Disconnectedness: Assessing University Students’ Well-Being Using an Experience Sampling Chatbot and Surveys Over Two Years of COVID-19Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533537(217-231)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
    • (2022)"It's Great to Exercise Together on Zoom!": Understanding the Practices and Challenges of Live Stream Group Fitness ClassesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35129186:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
    • (2022)How can Email Interventions Increase Students’ Completion of Online Homework? A Case Study Using A/B ComparisonsLAK22: 12th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference10.1145/3506860.3506874(107-118)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2022
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media