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Chatrooms in MOOCs: all talk and no action

Published: 04 March 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We study effects of introducing a real-time chatroom into a massive open online course with several thousand students, supplementing an existing forum. The chatroom was supported by teaching assistants, and generated thousands of lines of discussion by 28\% of 681 consenting chat condition participants, mostly on-topic. Despite this, chat activity remained low ($\mu=8.2$ messages per hour) and we could find no significant effect of chat use on objective or subjective dependent variables such as grades, retention, forum participation, or students' sense of community. Further investigation reveals that only 12\% of chat participants have substantive interactions, while the remainder are either passive or have trivial interactions that are unlikely to result in learning.
We also find that pervasive, highly visible chat interfaces are highly effective in encouraging both active and substantive participation in chat. When compared to chat interfaces that are restricted to a single webpage, the pervasive interface exhibits \changes{2.8 times} as many users with substantive interactions.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    L@S '14: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference
    March 2014
    234 pages
    ISBN:9781450326698
    DOI:10.1145/2556325
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 04 March 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. chat
    2. chatroom
    3. experiment
    4. massive open online course
    5. mooc
    6. participation
    7. retention
    8. synchronous

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    L@S 2014
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    L@S 2014: First (2014) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
    March 4 - 5, 2014
    Georgia, Atlanta, USA

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    L@S '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 14 of 38 submissions, 37%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 117 of 440 submissions, 27%

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    • (2023)Learners’ perspectives on MOOC designDistance Education10.1080/01587919.2022.215012644:3(476-494)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2023
    • (2022)Feature-Based Analysis of Social Networking and Collaboration in MOOCResearch Anthology on Applying Social Networking Strategies to Classrooms and Libraries10.4018/978-1-6684-7123-4.ch010(177-196)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
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