Research: Facebook May Keep Students in MOOCs
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have published a study that suggests students may be more likely to stick with massive
open
online courses (MOOCs) if they use Facebook.
Saijing
Zheng, a former doctoral student
at Penn State and current research scientist at Microsoft led the research and said she found that
open course students were
more engaged on Facebook groups and preferred interacting more on the
social
media site than through the course tools. That may be good news for
MOOC
instructors who, according to Zheng, get frustrated because 90 percent
of
students who enroll in MOOCs leave the course after less than two weeks.
"Social
media may provide another communication channel for
the students," Zheng said. "Current MOOC platforms do not include
collaborative
features for students to work together or good conversation channels
between
students and between students and teachers."
Interacting
with fellow students and teachers in Facebook
groups and other social media sites is sometimes easier than through
the
conventional course tools. One advantage of Facebook groups is that
users tend
to sign up with their real names while students can create fake
personas on
course message boards and forums.
Students
also appreciate that Facebook offers several ways to
contact the professor, she said. They can reply to a post, like a post
and even
send a private message. Students on Facebook groups can meet and chat
weeks
before the course starts and, in some cases, long after it ends.
Facebook replies and posts also tend to be better organized than
message board
conversations, which can easily become buried among other posts,
according to
the researchers.
"Students
often have information overload and they become
confused in the MOOC platform message forum," Zheng said. "For example,
the
same topic might be posted several times, but people won't be able to
see it."
For the study, the researchers collected data from three different
courses on
Coursera, a platform that hosts MOOCs, and from Facebook groups. They
found
that less than 10 percent of Coursera users posted content while 28
percent of
Facebook users were active in the three course groups. The research
team, led
by Zheng, also interviewed several MOOC instructors and students for
the
research report.
The findings were announced at the annual Association
for Computer Machinery Conference
on Learning at Scale at the University
of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland, in late
April.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.