MOOC DESIGN PRINCIPLES: TOPIC MODELLING-PYLDAVIS VISUALIZATION & SUMMARIZATION OF LEARNERS’ ENGAGEMENT

Abstract

This research is based on the thought process that informed the design of a virtual reality massive open online course (MOOC) in FutureLearn. One of the main significant aspects of developing an online course for a large cohort of learners is to first consider the structure and pedagogic instructions and theories underpinning the design. This research covers aspects of good pedagogical design practice and perspectives used for structuring the content of the course. Designing an online course such as a MOOC requires careful consideration of the structure of delivery and the pedagogic flow of the instructional resources and process. The proposed virtual reality course follows good practice pedagogy from a design science perspective. The course content is structured in a logical manner that guides the learners in directing their studies in a sequential order of engagement that was designed by the course coordinator. This research reveals how good instructional pedagogy theories and principles help to facilitate teaching and learning easily. The development of concepts that lead to self-directed learning makes facilitating online learning very easy for the educators. The learners and course evaluations were done using incremental weekly quizzes and exercises. This course is developed for learners with little or no programming skills or no experience in virtual worlds (Augmented, Virtual and Mixed realities). The concepts were delivered with instructional structure to guide and direct the learners for independent learning no matter their location. In this course, learners’ engagement with the resources is taken into consideration and reflective observations are done based on the demography of the registered participants. Action research and qualitative content analysis methods were applied to evaluate the text data from the research. The main purpose of the research is to investigate learners’ reasons for engaging with the course structural resources provided and to explore aspects of mitigation for future MOOC designs. The result reveals that majority of the learners registered for the course to learn more about the virtual reality (VR) course and to learn from their interaction with other learners. This research applied some natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract and summarize the prevalence topics or reasons for engagement from the icebreaker discussion. NLP techniques such as summarization, topic modelling and latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) were used to create the topic models for visualization.