Interaction in Massive Courses
J.UCS Special Issue
François Bry
(Institute for Informatics, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany
bry@lmu.de)
Martin Ebner
(Department Social Learning, Computer and Information Services
Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
martin.ebner@tugraz.at)
Alexander Pohl
(Institute for Informatics, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany
alexander.pohl@ifi.lmu.de)
Behnam Taraghi
(Department Social Learning, Computer and Information Services
Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
b.taraghi@tugraz.at)
1 Introduction
Traditional lectures, especially when given to large audiences, are
characterized by a prevalent passivity of students as well as reduced
interactions between the lecturer and the audience. For some years,
research has been devoted to exploring how new media can be harnessed
to support and promote collaborative activities in large learning
groups. Prominent applications or systems that have gained much
attention include social media such as Wikis, Twitter and Facebook for
(informal) information exchange [Siemens, 05], as well as Audience
Response Systems (ARS) for playfully assessing students' retention
and attention during lectures.
On the other side, investigation of the capabilities of Technology
Enhanced Learning (TEL) led to the development of Massive Open Online
Courses (MOOCs) capable of providing several ten thousands of learners
with access to courses over the web [McAuly, 10]. MOOCs have recently
gained much attention especially in the US and are now often
considered a highly promising form of academic teaching [Pappano,
12]. While the figures are impressive, MOOCs have yet to become
subject to sharp debates criticizing among other the educational
approach, vague business models, and the very drop off of MOOCs
attendees. However controversial MOOCs may be, they strikingly show
the potential of social and/or new media to fundamentally change
higher education. (Face-to-face) Lectures may no longer primarily
serve the purpose of disseminating information, which can be easily
retrieved from Wikis or online courses at any time. They may instead
focus on the deeper elaboration of learning materials, albeit in large
groups, putting high demands on interactions among learners as well as
faculty and scholars.
Nevertheless, regardless of whether the courses are offered online
(MOOC) or in the traditional face-to-face manner, new information is
nowadays often presented and delivered to a mass of students. Thereby
the individual learning process is largely disregarded and the
interaction among students, as well as between students and lecturers,
is reduced down to asking few questions. There is a long tradition in
research of learner-lecturer interaction in huge classrooms [Bligh,
71] [Gleason, 86]. Anderson et al. [Anderson, 03] which pointed out
the problems of such situations and summarized that there is a lack of
feedback (only few response of learners during a lecture), a fear to
ask questions in huge classes (students' apprehension), and a
typical single-speaker-paradigm. Due to the fact that learning is a
strong social and active process which proceeds by and through
conversation [Motschnik-Pitrik, 02] and interaction [Preece, 02], this
is exactly this topic that we would like to address with this Special
Issue.
2 Special Issue on Massive Interaction
The Special Issue aimed to gather research works in the field of
massive courses with a special focus on enhancing interaction between
lecturers-students or students-student in face-to-face situations or
completely online by using different kind of technologies - for
example, some few information systems created some years ago,
summarized unter the term "Audience Response Systems"
(ARS). With such systems, students are able to make votes on
lecturers' questions by using mostly special hardware [Anderson,
03]. Other possibilities are the use of Web 2.0 technologies
[Purgathofer, 08] or Social Media [Ebner, 11] [Bry, 13] to enhance
students' engagement in live-lecturing-situations. In the recent
years, the above-mentioned MOOCs attracted the interest of thousands
of students. Obviously this leads to new challenges on how to overcome
the management of a huge number of occurring interactions and calls
for new strategies [Khalil, 13a] [Khalil, 13b].
Assuming that rich interactions in large groups of learners are
critical to the development of academia, this Special Issue of the
Journal of Universal Computer Science is dedicated to research work on
media fostering interaction in massive courses.
Suggested topics of this special issue included (but were not limited
to) the following:
- Information Systems with a special focus on interaction in large classes
- Audience Response Systems
- Field studies about interaction in large learning groups
- Interaction in massive courses (presence and distance learning)
- New and Social Media use in classrooms for enhancing interaction
- Concepts, scenarios and technologies supporting collaboration and information sharing in scope of massive courses.
- Strategies, techniques and technologies fostering peer to peer learning and community building in massive online courses
- Implicit knowledge discovery and recommender systems for enhancing collaborations within massive online courses
- Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) concepts to enhance interactions in massive online courses
- Literature reviews on interaction in large learning groups, e.g. MOOCs
- Position and vision papers
3 Contributions of the special issue
The special issue got huge attention due to the fact that MOOCs can be
seen as big trend or hype these days. Nevertheless a careful
peer-review-process reduced the number of contributions to finally
five:
3.1 Proposal for a Conceptual Framework for Educators to Describe and
Design MOOCs
The first contribution aimed to point out a conceptual framework for
doing a MOOC. The authors provide support to educators when designing
or describing their online course by suggesting the so-called MOOC
Canvas. The MOOC Canvas defines eleven interrelated issues that are
addressed through a set of questions, offering a visual and
understandable guidance for educators during the MOOC design
process. Finally a practical example is given how the canvas is used.
3.2 Adapting an Awareness Tool for Massive Courses: the Case of ClassON
In this contribution an awareness tool for massive face-to-face
education is introduced. The architecture as well as features of the
tool are described and discussed. It is concluded that such tools
helps to increase massive education.
3.3 Developing a Web-Based Question-Driven Audience Response System
Supporting BYOD
The authors of this research work introduce a new Audience Response
System addressing the new trend BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Students
can use their own (mobile) devices to provide answers to
online-questions of the lecturers. After a careful analyze of existing
possibilities a new system was developed and evaluated in huge
classrooms.
3.4 Toward Project-based Learning and Team Formation in Open Learning
Environments
The final contribution is dealing again with MOOCs. The authors
address one of the weaknesses of pure online courses - the lack of
collaborative learning opportunities. In this research work a
suggestion for an automated service for the initiation of
project-based learning and team formation is given. On the basis of a
survey a solution how such service can be done in future is pointed
out.
4 Program Committee
We express our gratitude to the program committee for their valuable
work on reviewing all contributions and giving detailed
feedback. Thank you for your expertise:
- Albert Dietrich (Graz University of Technology, Austria)
- Cress Ulrike (University Tübingen, Germany)
- Donovan Diane (University of Queensland, Australia)
- Downes Stephen (National Research Council of Canada, Canada)
- Duval Erik (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
- Fies Carmen (University of Texas, USA)
- Gersch Martin (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
- Grosseck Gabriela (University of the West Timisoara, Romania)
- Harrington Jan (Murdoch University, Australia)
- Harris Trevor (University of Wales, UK)
- Holotescu Carmen (Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania)
- Holzinger Andreas (Medical University Graz, Austria)
- Irvine Valerie (University of Victoria, Canada)
- Kalz Marco (Open University Netherlands, Netherland)
- Khalil Hanan (Mansoura University, Egypt)
- Kickmeier-Rust, Michael (Graz University of Technology, Austria)
- Kopp Michael (University of Graz, Austria)
- Lindstaedt Stefanie (Graz University of Technology, Austria)
- Littlejohn Allison (University of Glasgow, Scotland)
- Loch Birgit (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
- Lorenz Anja (Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany)
- Purgathofer Peter (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
- Schön Sandra (Salzburg Research, Austria)
- Sloep Peter (Open University Netherlands, Netherland)
- Weinberger Armin (Saarland University, Germany)
- Zottmann Jan (Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany)
Francois Bry
Martin Ebner
Alexander Pohl
Behnam Taraghi
Munich (Germany) & Graz (Austria)
References
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