Open and Distance Education/Learner Support for MOOC Learning

The need for MOOC learner support is because the learners work alone with a networked computer in the process of learning, and the instructors and peers cannot be physical with them to give them help. In this case, MOOC learners have special needs that differ from the traditional student support. MOOC providers need to know what level of support they can provide, and to be explicit and clear to learners what level of support they can expect from them. It is essential to make sure that the support is having full breadth. Appropriate supports are the vital factor in determining whether the student can successfully learn.

Morrison (2014) classified the learner support into two parts: technical support and study skills support. Technical support is helping learners to get access to the systems. A large part of this support is to solve the problems about the passwords, assignments and to give students a feeling that they are supported by the institution. Study skills support is to help students to acquire their abilities to study online, such as how to take a MOOC, how to schedule their time and so on. In the following, five different specific supports were discussed.

Encourage learners’ SRL
As discussed before, SRL is required for a learner to finish a MOOC course. Several solutions have been practiced, but unfortunately, none has been proved to be useful to learner’ SRL. Kizilcec and Davis et al. found the same conclusion that increasing learner’ SRL did not keep learners’ persistence to their course. For this deficiency, there is a devious way to achieve the goal. Learners could only realize that they lacked SRL when they got feedback about their performance or understanding in the course from providers and peers.

Make full use of the discussion forum
Discussion forums are the main ways of interaction between instructors and learners. Forums have various of expectations, such as increasing participation, promoting effective learning, maintaining motivation and decreasing the rate of drop-out. Overall, completing learners are much more active than non-completers in the forum and forum posting are the measure of student participation. There are two styles forums: peer-supported and tutor-supported. Peer-supported one is used in “traditional” MOOC forum which used for students to discuss and answer the questions with each other, but seldom with instructor intervention. Tutor-supported one is monitored by instructors to provide rapid and definitive answers to students’ questions. Until now, there are some problems with the forum. For example, the topics are fragmented, a lot of postings are negative, search facilities are not enough, peer answers and suggestions are incorrect, the discussion is not open to all because of the language barrier, etc..

Send an email to remind the student to attend the course
MOOC providers send emails to remind students to continue the study or give some new courses information. For example, edX sends email to remind participants to continue studying the chosen courses after a new week course unloaded; Coursera sends one recommended courses email to participants per week. Sometimes, participants did not pay attention to these remind emails. Email as one learner support did not play a significant role.

Learner dashboards
Learner dashboard is a useful tool to collect the learner activities’ data and use the data to support reflection, behavior change, awareness in an online environment. The main purpose of learning dashboards is to help the learner to improve their performance and motivation. However, there were only few dashboards were used for MOOC, and most of them only focused on teachers’ support. Kia et al. (2016) presented an analytic module for the instructor to investigate the students’ age, gender, educational background, and location. edX has developed a similar one that collects student’s information useful to course provider. Comparing to the immature dashboards for providers, dashboards that seek to empower learners are much weaker.

Use Facebook and Twitter as an additional interaction tool
Apart from the above supports from MOOC providers, MOOC learner uses Facebook and Twitter as an additional interaction tool. Facebook and Twitter are tools which enable groups of people to communicate. Attending Facebook and Twitter augmented the learners’ experience by sharing resources, connecting with others, posting personal feelings or reflection. The Facebook group were more useful than Twitter regarding participants’ reflection. But not all of the students engaged the social media, and only a small number of people were active in Facebook and Twitter. Using social media tools will need instructor’s mediation and scaffolding, and future study needs to cover whether the instructors’ use of these communication tools would influence the students’ use.