School of Information Sciences

Cunningham to speak at Learning with MOOCs conference

Doctoral student Paige Cunningham will participate this week in the conference, Learning with MOOCs III: Being and Learning in a Digital Age, to be held October 6-7 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Cunningham will present her paper, “Massive Data, Individual Learners: Challenges for Developing Holistic Views of MOOC Participants.” She will address the challenges of drawing meaningful insight from learner data regarding MOOCs offered by the University of Illinois.

When the University of Illinois and Coursera first partnered in 2012, the number of offered courses was small, so the large amounts of learner data provided was manageable. Since then, the number of course offerings has risen and the data provided to the university from Coursera has changed. While an increase in volume of learner data initially sounds rich for developing a holistic view of learner engagement and performance, the data produced is not necessarily meaningful.

For example, learner grade data is relatively easy to extract regardless of platform, but such data only provides a superficial understanding of learner engagement. More meaningful glimpses into such engagement can be acquired from in-depth lecture watching data and clickstream data. However, these data sources are not currently available for on-demand courses, making accurate comparisons between engagement in session-based and on-demand courses problematic.

Previously both free and paid learners could complete all course activities, allowing for collection of all learners’ data. A new shift towards only permitting students to complete graded assessments after paying for a certificate means that evaluation of their levels of engagement will be based on sparse lecture watching and forum participation data.

Finally, the University of Illinois is pioneering several degree-granting graduate programs based on the Coursera platform, adding an additional layer of complexity to the data collection process. Integrating such different data sources makes defining an overall picture of learner engagement still more difficult.

Cunningham is a fourth-year doctoral student whose research interests focus on how information technologies connect people who are spread out in space and time. She explores issues such as how social media and online learning systems connect geographically dispersed peoples, both for community building and educational purposes.

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