Abstract
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) allow lecturers to overcome spatiotemporal boundaries and reach large numbers of participants. However, the completion rates of MOOCs are relatively low, a critical obstacle to their ultimate success. Existing literature suggests that strengthening student interaction has the potential to increase student commitment. The goal of this study is to develop a novel, market-based knowledge-sharing method that fosters student engagement and interaction in MOOCs, addressing the problem of low completion rates and demonstrating how MOOC engagement can lead to greater student success. The proposed method, “Knowledge Stock Exchange” (KSX), is derived from the concept of crowd-based intelligence mechanisms for incentive-compatible information aggregation. Using a popular MOOC as the focus of our empirical study, we show that the KSX method increases student interaction as well as MOOC completion rates. Moreover, we find that KSX participation has a significant positive effect on participants’ exam grades.
Highlights
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) received considerable attention in higher education when companies such as edX, Udacity and Coursera began offering courses that attracted tens of thousands of students [1, 2]
We develop and evaluate an incentive-compatible knowledge sharing method–the Knowledge Stock Exchange (KSX)–that aims at increasing student completion rates in the context of MOOCs by combining cooperative and competitive components
This paper contributes in three major ways to the ongoing problem of low engagement and interaction in MOOCs as well as knowledge management in general
Summary
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) received considerable attention in higher education when companies such as edX, Udacity and Coursera began offering courses that attracted tens of thousands of students [1, 2]. MOOCs can be seen as an instrument for bridging the gap of temporal, geographical and social distances between students, lecturers and institutions. Many MOOCs exceed a participant level of 10,000 students, most of these same MOOCs show only modest completion rates of below 10 percent [3]. MOOCs were propagated in combination with the pedagogical approach of connectivism which demands a high level of social connectedness and interactivity [4, 5]. The generation of MOOCs has focused on the demand for scalability, establishing such practices as video lectures, computer-graded exams and quizzes (with low collaboration among students) [2]. Recent studies attribute the low completion rates to the low student interaction [6, 7]
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