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Analysing student participation in Foreign Language MOOCs: a case study
Elena Bárcena, Timothy Read, Elena Martín-Monje & Mª Dolores Castrillo
Furthermore, as figure 2 shows, out of those 925 active
forum users, half of them only posted one message, and
around 3% posted more than ten. It must also be mentioned
that there was a very prolific forum user who posted
a total of 96 messages in the course forum. This datum
should be taken into account, since it affects the calculated
average.
Figure 3. Threads in the MOOC forum related to P2P
As can be seen in figure 3, 11 threads out of the total of
546 in the course forum were related to P2P activities
and they mainly focused on technical issues: problems
with uploading the videos, students who were not sent
P2P activities to assess, completed activities that appear
as incomplete in the student log, etc.
The post-course questionnaire for students contained
over 40 items but for the purpose of this paper, which
aimed at analyzing the P2P module and its role in course
abandonment, we will concentrate solely on those related
to P2P activities and feedback, namely: satisfaction with
P2P activities, satisfaction with P2P feedback (provided
by course mates), adequacy of the evaluation with the
course contents, and P2P usability. Table 4 below shows
these four categories together, so that they can be compared
and contrasted. A 5-point Likert scale was used, 1
being very little and 5 very much.
Table 4. Data related to P2P
Discussion
In the previous section the authors have provided data
related to the first language MOOC in Spain, whose first
edition was run during the first three months of 2013.
Despite the precedents in other countries, where the
background and profile of MOOC students is completely
heterogeneous (Worlock & Ricci, 2013), the group of students
here was mostly composed of Spanish natives, which
was highly suitable to the approach followed in this course
in the sense that it emphasized divergences between both
languages and addressed English language topics of special
difficulty for students with Spanish as their mother
tongue (false friends, interferences, lack of structural parallelisms,
etc.). The analysis of the students’ educational
background revealed that the majority were university
students. This was rather unexpected because MOOCs
are largely aimed at the population outside formal education,
particularly those in tertiary education. However, the
fact that the majority of the students in the MOOC were
in formal education is due to the fact that this was one
of the first courses in the Miríada X platform, and hence
one of the first in the country. Most of the students were
adults between 25 and 55 years of age, which does not
coincide with the digital native age group and, as expected,
most of the problems that were raised in the MOOC
forums were related to technical difficulties. This fact was
not expected, since the Miríada X platform is very intuitive
and user-friendly. However, the reality was that students
were often confused about the platform tools, particularly
in the P2P module, and there were a high number of incidences
raised online. During the first weeks, a high number
of courses were launched and thousands of students
invaded the server, which caused the server to crash and
connection with the platform to be lost.
The reception of the MOOC initiative in Spain was welcomed
with great enthusiasm, as can be demonstrated by
the large number of registered students, not only in language
courses (the most numerous) but also in other disciplines.
It should be noted as well that MOOCs typically
have between 3 and 10 European credits (the Professional
English MOOC had 5). However, in contrast with UNED’s
online courses, whose students are very cautious when
registering for a small number of credits per academic
year given the costs of the registration they have to pay,
both the attractive thematic offer of the MOOCs (mostly
related to social and work demands) and the fact that they
are free of charge by definition led students to register in
several courses at the same time.
The information about the development of the course
was obtained through the teaching team’s observation of
how students did in their activities and interacted in the
forums, and also a final questionnaire. The students valued
the course positively, three aspects in particular: its
flexible structure, and the scaffolding and feedback mechanisms.
Unlike other courses whose teaching teams decided
to make materials available to students gradually to
Research Track | 15