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The SIRET Training Platform: Facing the Dropout
Phenomenon of MOOC Environments
Sergio Miranda, Giuseppina Rita Mangione, Francesco
Orciuoli, Vincenzo Loia and Saverio Salerno
Links to content within the core platform or external
material allow students to acquire knowledge that is preparatory
for the course. It is also possible to schedule specific
course modules within a class, articulate the material
related to each lesson (e.g. video lessons and exercises)
and manage homework and quizzes (exams needed to
obtain a certification). In fact, MOMAMOOC offers the
possibility of authoring and executing different types of
test. It is also possible to manage discussions through
a forum for Q&A within a class. The forum becomes a
support mechanism for dialogue and debate, ‘triggered’
by the study of material related to the presented video
lessons (or exercises). A Wiki section structured by the
teacher according to their teaching approach may enrich
the classroom environment.
Figure 3. Video lecture player.
them to learning content by means of standard metadata
(IMS). MOMAMOOC provides personalised learning
paths that allow the individual student to evaluate his/
her knowledge related to one or more topics and subsequently
receive a recovery plan based on assessment results.
This feature enriches the experience of evaluation
tests on important course concepts. Once the student
has answered the test questions, the system evaluates
the student’s knowledge and, where necessary, proposes
a remedial path (sequence of learning content) that aims
to bridge the gap revealed by the test. The experience of
recovery continues until the student has demonstrated
that he has covered his ‘gap’. The second distinctive feature
of MOMAMOOC is the so-called OFAL (high level
learning goals). In particular, the OFAL is an environment
in which students can express their learning needs in natural
language and receive a learning path (sequence of
learning objects) adequate to meet the expressed needs
in response. Briefly, OFAL is a kind of semantic Q&A system,
in which the expressed needs that the system cannot
answer are taken over by the teacher (or possibly by the
whole class) who can respond to it and update a knowledge
base that can later respond to similar requests. The
system can also leverage this collective intelligence to
feed on new content. This functionality offers the learners
the opportunity to refine their learning goals by simply
writing what they are looking for in terms of a theme, a
concept, a problem to solve or a professional competence
to acquire. All these aspects are similar to the training scenario
developing within the SIRET project. Lastly, an additional
MOMAMOOC feature is the ability to offer online
tutoring sessions by using an integrated videoconferencing
service. This virtual classroom provides desktop sharing
whiteboard, instant messaging and co-browsing.
To support this environment, MOMAMOOC offers
tools to aggregate links to external resources and RSS
feeds and the ability to perform surveys that may be useful
to the teacher who wishes to assess the quality of lessons
and their suitability for enrolled students. It also provides
the opportunity for students to monitor their progress
as part of class exercises. Finally, MOMAMOOC is able
to issue certificates conditioned upon the occurrence of
events such as, for example, exceeding 80% of the tests
proposed in the examination sessions.
Distinctive features
In addition to the basic functionalities described above,
MOMAMOOC provides a set of distinctive features that
enrich the MOOC with innovative tools useful to support
students in their learning journey and to give them
something that, while not exactly one-to-one tutoring,
still takes their needs and profiles into account, creating
tailored and adaptive learning experiences. The first two
features are based on the ability of IWT to describe the
domain by using light ontologies and the ability to bind
Conclusions and future works
This paper proposes a MOOC environment able to tackle
the dropout phenomenon. The idea is to fill the lack of
one-to-one tutoring in MOOCs by providing an adaptive
environment. This will be achieved by extending IWT, a
semantic web-based platform able to deliver personalised
learning courses by respecting user needs and profiles.
The IWT approach should be more effective than the
usual approach taken by other MOOC environments and
should result in improved performance when related to
the main problems we have raised.
This extension, realised in the context of the SIRET
project, is to be tested during its evaluation activities. The
users to involve are the ordinary jobseekers who are hungry
for new competences that enhance their professional
opportunities.
The employment exchanges and agencies will receive
personal requests. They will collate candidate profile information
and engage them in recruitment processes.
Research Track |111