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Analysing student participation in Foreign Language MOOCs: a case study
Elena Bárcena, Timothy Read, Elena Martín-Monje & Mª Dolores Castrillo
other’s audio recordings, something that paid attention
to sociolinguistic aspects related to the corresponding intercultural
topic of the module. P2P activities can be seen
to represent a dynamic interchange between students,
where they are, to some extent, freed from the structural
restrictions of the course, in order to interact with each
other in a way that is relevant to the activity that they
have to perform, sharing and working together on what
is being produced. Given the number of students in a
MOOC and the autonomy of the way in which they learn
(with very little, if any, contact with the teaching team), the
forums typically offer the only way in which the students
can interact. P2P activities, however, go beyond the types
of message-based interchanges possible in the forums
since they enable the students to work collaboratively on
a given activity. In this example, students had to record
their oral production in video format and upload it to the
MOOC platform. Table 1 shows an example from Module
1:
In the job adverts in some countries it is common to find
references to what could be considered “personal” traits and
require candidates to be a specific sex, age range, physical
characteristics, religion, etc.
What do you think of this
Do you consider that this procedure is discriminatory or
not
Can you identify any circumstances (types of jobs, etc.)
where these personal requirements could make sense and be
appropriate
Table 1. Example of a P2P activity
The P2P interaction was undertaken in groups of four
students. Each activity was sent automatically to three
other students who acted as evaluators or raters and had
to provide feedback following the guidelines provided in
the MOOC. Only students who had uploaded their video
recording were sent videos of their peers to be evaluated.
This was an automated process in the MiríadaX platform;
not all MOOC platforms permit P2P activities, since they
require added technical sophistication in order to form
the working groups. Participants were provided with
evaluation criteria that they were encouraged to use in
order to make their peer review more meaningful to their
course mates. The criteria were, firstly, appropriateness
of vocabulary, terminology and register; secondly, grammatical
correctness; thirdly, fluency, pronunciation and
intonation; and fourthly, intelligibility and coherence.
Module
Table 2. Number of students who completed each module and P2P
activities
The disparity between figures in the second and third column
shows that P2P activities were not the most popular
of the module activities. Students had to complete 80% of
them in order to pass and these data suggest that, whenever
possible, P2P activities were left out. When looking
at written interaction in the MOOC forum, the number of
threads and posts is quite staggering (see table 3):
Category No. threads No. posts
General
discussion
No. students who
completed the
module
206 1032
Presentation 36 273
Module 1 113 505
Module 2 75 334
Module 3 38 166
Module 4 30 151
Module 5 29 86
Module 6 19 55
TOTAL 546 2602
Table 3. Interaction in student forum.
No. students who
completed the P2P
activity
1 7922 2842
2 4869 2006
3 3641 1714
4 3016 1564
5 2662 1494
6 2477 1391
However, the number of students who wrote posts in
the course forum was quite low. Only 925 wrote posts in
the twelve weeks of the course which, compared to the
19,076 participants who started the course, represents
less than 5% of them.
Data analysis
Table 2 shows the number of students who completed the
P2P activity, compared to the number of students who
completed each module:
Figure 2. Proportion of students and posts
Research Track | 14