Understanding Participant's Behaviour in Massively Open Online Courses

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Understanding Participant's Behaviour in Massively Open Online Courses
Bruno Poellhuber, Normand Roy, Ibthihel Bouchoucha, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019/02/28
This article is a useful correction to the caterwauling about MOOC drop-out rates in the early days of the research. The authors identify five major categories of MOOC users, each of which has a different set of objectives and behaviours in the course: browsers, self-assessors, serious readers, active-independent, active-social. There's also a category called 'ghosts' (or, in the abstract, 'ghots', which I think is actually a better word). According to the authors, "we need to rethink the names and definitions used in MOOC research". More...