One of the interesting aspects of MOOCs is their attempt to introduce a social aspect to the courses by providing online forums to allow students to discuss the course with one another.  It’s something that is commonplace in traditional school environments, but has been somewhat harder to pull off online.

A recent study from Wright State University has explored these discussion forums to assess whether they help the students grasp the content of their courses.  The research revealed that forums that helped to support dense collaboration networks delivered improved academic outcomes for members, especially those who were central to that network.

“This project is about how students interact with one another,” the authors say. “Learning is very much a social activity, and you see that with students getting together to study and in classroom discussions. The more opportunities students have to interact with one another to talk about the subject, the more successful they are likely to be in learning.”

Social learning

The researchers trawled through data from three semester courses in physics and engineering.  Each course provided students with an online forum to allow them to discuss course materials among themselves.  Whilst participation in the forum was not graded, students could earn extra credit from doing so.

The researchers anonymized the dataset before deploying a couple of tools to assess it.  The first was the PageRank tool used by Google to rank the most important web pages on various topics.  It does this by measuring the links between nodes in the network to identify the most important ones. In this instance, it was designed to measure the number of interactions an individual had with their classmates and identify who were the most important members of the class.

“What we are finding is a clear correlation between students’ centrality in the network and their success in class,” the authors say. “That really shows there is some connection between being involved in the network and doing well.”

So was this correlation or causation?  The researchers accept that it’s far from clear whether increased participation in the forums contributed to academic success, but it is something that they are hoping to explore further in future research.  What does appear clear is that instructor involvement in the forums was important.

In two of the three semesters, the tutor used the forum as the main channel for distributing course materials.  He would also engage with students via a weekly professor comment section that would also contain interesting news related to the course from the wider world.  This engagement helped to prompt wider engagement from students.

The next step is to delve deeper into the kind of interactions the students are having online, and to explore what it is about the forums that appears to support the academic success of sections of the class.

“We want to understand the educational setting in a way that will allow us to improve it, so we can develop new tools that will help students be more successful in class, understand physics and other coursework better, and ultimate be more successful in college,” the researchers conclude.