Th
is document is p
ublished in:
Hernández-Leo, D. et al. (eds.) (2013). Scaling up Learning for
Sustained Impact: 8th European Conference, on Technology
Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2013, Paphos, Cyprus, September
17-21, 2013. Proceedings. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
8095) Springer, 5-18.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40814-4_2
© 2013. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
Institutional Repository
Analysing the Impact of Built-In and External Social
Tools in a MOOC on Educational Technologies
Carlos Alario-Hoyos
1
, Mar Pérez-Sanagustín
1
, Carlos Delgado-Kloos
1
,
Hugo A. Parada G.
1
, Mario Muñoz-Organero
1
, and Antonio Rodríguez-de-las-Heras
2
1
Department of Telematic Engineering, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Av. Universidad, 30, 28911, Leganés (Madrid), Spain
{calario,mmpsanag,cdk,hparada,munozm}@it.uc3m.es
2
Faculty of Humanities, Communication and Documentation
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Calle Madrid,
126, 28903, Getafe (Madrid), Spain
heras@hum.uc3m.es
A
bstract. MOOCs have been a dis
ruptive educational trend in the last months. Some
M
O
O
Cs just replicate traditional teaching pedagogies, adding multimedia e
lements like
video lectures. Others go beyond, trying to engage the massive number
of
participants
by
promoting
discussions and relying on their contribu-tions to the course. MOOC
platforms usually provide some built-in social tools for this purpose, although instructors
or participants may suggest others to fos-ter discussions and crowdsourcing. This paper
analyses the impact of two built-in (Q&A and forum) and three external social tools
(Facebook, Twitter and MentorMob) in a MOOC on educational technologies. Most of
the participants agreed on the importance of social tools to be in touch with their
partners and share information related to the course, the forum being the one preferred.
Fur-thermore, the lessons learned from the enactment of this MOOC employing so-cial
tools are summarized so that others may benefit from them.
Keywords: MOOCs, Social Tools, Educational Technologies, Crowdsourcing.
1 Introduction
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are considered one of the main educational
trends in the last months [1, 2]. Initiatives like Coursera, edX, Udacity or MiríadaX
are changing the ways we teach and learn, going beyond traditional online courses,
and reaching thousands of learners worldwide [3]. The opportunity for free training
through courses taught by experts from major Universities in a ubiquitous context
seems very attractive for learners, opening up new opportunities for defining new
pedagogies [4] and business models [5].
MOOCs are deployed in platforms that offer services for managing the massive
amount of learners. The role of instructors in MOOCs is to design the initial contents, the
assignments and the assessment activities that they later upload to these platforms. How-
ever, instructors play a secondary role during the enactment of MOOCs, compared
1
to traditional online courses
, since they cannot provide personalized support to the
massive number of participants [6, 7]. The community of learners registered in
MOOCs is expected to assist their partners, and to enrich the course with discussions
and related contents as a way of crowdsourcing [8]; that is called “learner as teacher
as learner” model [9]. The instructor becomes a “guide on the side” [10] clarifying
only those key questions that drive the debate [11].
One of the main characteristics of current MOOCs is the high attrition rate among
registered users [12], which can go up to 90-95% [1]. This is partially due to the free
nature of most MOOCs, which attracts many observers that are not really interested in
the contents delivered. However, many other users that are interested leave the course
earlier than expected. Among their reasons, their difficulties to become self-learners
and the lack of personalized support from instructors [8]. One approach to tackle this
problem is to offer several social tools during the MOOC enactment in order to create
a community of participants that provides support and advice to those with difficul-
ties, connecting learners at an emotional and value level [13].
MOOC platforms normally include some built-in social tools like forums to cen-
tralize learners’ contributions, discussions and queries; but also, instructors may sug-
gest alternative tools, external to the platform. However, instead of introducing a pool
of social tools randomly, it should be detected which ones are adequate to effectively
build connections and collaboration among learners [7, 14]. Moreover, a proper selec-
tion of social tools can be a good mechanism to engage learners and promote their
participation during the course, as outlined in recent guides for MOOCs design [15].
In summary, a proper selection of social tools can facilitate the community with the
necessary support to advance in the course and may help reducing drop-outs from
those learners that are interested in the course subject.
This paper proposes a deep analysis of how social tools are perceived and utilised
by MOOC learners to shed some light on their selection process. Particularly, this
analysis involves five social tools used throughout six weeks in a MOOC on educa-
tional technologies taught in Spanish and deployed in the platform MiríadaX by Tele-
fónica Learning Services
1
. Two of the tools are built-in (a Q&A service and a forum),
while three are external to the platform (Facebook
2
, Twitter
3
and MentorMob
4
). The
analysis on these tools includes their level of activity in order to detect which social
tools are more actively employed, and the kind of information instructors and learners
share through them.
The remaining of this paper proceeds as follows: section 2 presents the design of
the MOOC on educational technologies and its deployment in the MiríadaX platform,
including the built-in and external social tools chosen; section 3 overviews the enact-
ment of the course, collecting information about learners’ profiles and performance;
section 4 analyses the level of activity in the five social tools and learners’ perception
on them; section 5 discusses the lessons learnt from the use of these social tools in the
MOOC, with conclusions and future work in section 6.
1
http://miriadax.net/web/educacion_digital_futuro
2
https://facebook.com
3
https://twitter.com
4
http://mentormob.com
2
2 Design and Deployment of the MOOC
Five Professors and teaching assistants from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
(Spain) participated in the design and deployment of the MOOC on educational tech-
nologies. The six weeks of this MOOC under analysis were structured into two mod-
ules covering two fields of knowledge: humanities and engineering. Thus, a wide
range of learners could be reached no matter their backgrounds. Particularly, lectures
on humanities (module 1) dealt with the concept of interaction and its application to
the digital world, while those in engineering (module 2) were about the use of mobile
devices in educational settings. Each module was taught during three consecutive
weeks. An introductory module presenting the course context, structure, assessment
and the social tools was released the day before the first module started.
2.1 Design of the MOOC
The MOOC was designed considering three different aspects in both modules: learn-
ing contents, assignments and assessment activities. Learning contents included 8-9
short videos of about ten minutes each week (24-27 videos per module) and support-
ing materials (i.e. the slides used in some videos); the videos contained weekly inter-
views with experts on the delivered topics. Assignments included additional reading
material and a set of open questions in form of a video showing the opinion of both
students and teachers at the campus. Finally, assessment activities covered formative
assessment with multiple choice tests after each video lecture to reinforce the ex-
plained concepts; and summative assessment with one multiple choice test every
week, and a peer review activity at the end of each module, where learners had to
submit a work related to the contents explained in that module and later review some
peers’ works following a given rubric. The contents, assignments and assessment
activities were available at the beginning of the week and remained open throughout
the course, except for summative assessment activities, which were due at scheduled
intervals.
2.2 Deployment of the MOOC
The MOOC was deployed in MiríadaX. This platform allows defining a course struc-
ture arranged in different modules, including multimedia resources, multiple choice
tests and peer review activities. Videos were uploaded to Youtube and later embedded
in MiríadaX as multimedia resources. The course could be followed from laptops,
smartphones or tablets facilitating a ubiquitous participation and learning. The plat-
form also provides features to send massive emails to the registered learners, and to
publish announcements related to the course in a blog. Also, MiríadaX offers the fol-
lowing built-in social tools that were added to the MOOC:
• Q&A. This is a tool for learners to make questions about the enactment of the
course, the contents of the modules or the platform. The instructors and other par-
ticipants may answer the questions or vote them as relevant to gain visibility.
3
• Forum. This is a tool for learners to participate in discussions on selected course
topics. The learners must maintain it, but instructors can define a thread structure
and make comments on relevant learners’ observations about course issues.
Three extra external social tools were selected for this MOOC:
• Facebook. Instructors can use this tool to send announcements, foster discussions
and share additional multimedia resources with learners, who can contribute to the
discussion and share new resources too.
• Twitter. Instructors can employ this tool to send short announcements, links to
additional resources and quotes extracted from video lectures and learners, who
can contribute disseminating the course to their followers.
• MentorMob. Instructors and learners can classify and share reading material and
websites related to each of the modules through this tool.
Finally, two other external tools were selected in this MOOC: Storify
5
to arrange
and share a collection of relevant tweets every week; and Google Drive
6
to deliver
questionnaires about learners’ profiles and degree of satisfaction with the course.
These tools were only used for the instructors to collect and show the learners a sum-
mary of the activity in the social tools around the course.
3 Enactment of the MOOC
The two modules of this MOOC under analysis were enacted in February – March
2013. The course was announced three weeks before starting in Spanish and Latin
American universities, social networks and press. The first day of the course there
were 3105 registered participants. Nevertheless, the registry was never disabled and
many learners joined later. All the contents were available since the week they were
released to the end of the course, except for summative assessment activities, which
were due in scheduled intervals. Even though many latecomers missed some of the
first summative assessment activities, the instructors encouraged them not to leave the
course since they could pass it by successfully accomplishing the remaining ones.
The number of registered users after the six weeks was 5455.
3.1 Learners’ Profiles and Motivation
Registered participants had to fill out a questionnaire to help instructors detect pro-
files and motivation as part of the introductory module. 3,362 learners submitted the
answers to the questionnaire (44.6% men and 55.4% women). The range of ages was
very varied with most participants between 25-35 years (37.5%) and 35-45 years
(24.4%). Learners were located in 40 different countries (mainly Spain and Latin
America), which represents a high impact of this MOOC reaching people through
multiple frontiers, and at the same time a challenge to teach people with so many
different cultural backgrounds. Top countries by number of participants were Spain
5
http://storify.com
6
http://drive.google.com
4
