Abstract
While massive open online courses (MOOCs) can be effective in scaling education, orchestrating collaborative learning activities for large audiences remains a non-trivial task that introduces a series of practical challenges, such as the lack of adequate human support. Even when collaboration takes place, there is uncertainty whether meaningful interactions will occur among learners. This work presents the architecture of a prototype system called PeerTalk. The system was created to enable instructors to easily incorporate real-time collaborative learning activities into their online courses. Furthermore, PeerTalk employs a conversational agent service that aims to scaffold students’ online collaboration and provide valuable guidance, which can be configured by the course instructor. In order to investigate the user-acceptance of the system, two evaluation studies took place. The first one involved a group of experts, i.e., MOOC instructors who are expected to use such a system in their course, whereas the second study featured 44 postgraduate students. The study findings were encouraging in terms of the system efficiency and usability levels, laying the foundation for a conversational agent service, which can effectively scale the support of the teaching staff and be easily integrated in MOOC platforms, creating further opportunities for valuable social interaction among learners.
Highlights
In the light of the pandemic, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been established as one of the most important crisis management solutions, enriching learning opportunities and ensuring that education continues without major disruptions (Bylieva et al, 2020)
The agent domain model can be configured by any MOOC instructor, who may be interested in providing automated support to their students
During the experts’ heuristic evaluation, the task time was measured providing useful information regarding efficiency relating to PeerTalk
Summary
In the light of the pandemic, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been established as one of the most important crisis management solutions, enriching learning opportunities and ensuring that education continues without major disruptions (Bylieva et al, 2020). The PeerTalk conversational agent was designed to be reusable in various courses and domains In this manner, the agent domain model can be configured by any MOOC instructor, who may be interested in providing automated support to their students. The conversational agent may intervene during peers’ discussion to display a tip or a challenging question, asking students’ opinion on an important course topic When this occurs, peers may leverage their critical thinking and perform some mental rehearsal in order to try answering the agent question, reinforcing links in their mental models and enhancing memory retention. The system is loosely coupled with the MOOC platform and adopts an Event-driven model, which operates over web socket connections between the
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