Investigation of social contributions of language oriented MOOC learner groups

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have attracted millions of people who are geographically dispersed. MOOCs are mainly authored in English. However, a big proportion of the participants speaks English as a foreign language. There are studies reporting that some participants struggle with understanding the language in the video lectures and are reluctant to communicate with other fellow learners. Personalisation services have been proposed to help learners who are having various difficulties in MOOCs. In order to provide help to English as a second language speakers (ESL) in MOOCs, there is a need for identifying them in case their language information is not provided. The aim of our research is to i) identify ESL participants, ii) investigate the behaviours of ESL participants, and iii) predict their performance based on their previous activities in the course to enable a personalised intervention. In our previous studies, MOOC learners were grouped based on their location and their comments. This paper investigates the overall social engagement of participants in a MOOC.