Teams of Learners in a Teacher Professional Development Massive Open Online Course

• In Event: 72.041 - Leveraging Massive Open Online Courses to Foster Teacher Professional Development

Abstract

How are MOOC participant outcomes affected by participants being in teams? When there are only a few instructors for thousands of students, courses might require students to help each other learn. This goal may be especially achievable when the learners are themselves professional teachers. Such individuals make up the majority of the participants in this study. This paper describes how learners interacted within teams in a set of teacher professional development MOOCs. In these four-lesson, two-to-three month MOOCs, learners could form teams of two to eight; although they could switch teams, the intention was for teams to remain stable through the course.

Mixed methods were used, including qualitative analysis of learners' textual interactions and statistical analysis of participant-level data. In particular, participants’ written interactions were open-coded; regressions and factor analysis were used to evaluate how different pre-course indicators, activities during the course, and final course outcomes related to each other within this group; and social network analysis was used as well to describe the interactions between peers in the course.

Working on the instructional team in these courses, the authors formed intuitions about how peers interacted, including observing some teams as the course progressed and responding to learners' questions and issues in the course forum and through private messages. These intuitions, discussions with other educational researchers, and the prevailing literatures on online learning, MOOCs, teacher professional development, and higher education shaped our inquiry. The confluence of these fields is still new, and this descriptive analysis advances what we know about learning in this context.

We have a rich record of participants' course involvement. The final outcome measures are continuing course activity (i.e., non-attrition), completion of course requirements, and satisfaction ratings. Important qualitative analysis and quantitative variables are derived from discussions in forums, on team blog pages, and in in-platform messages; survey responses; team-formation; team meetings organized through the platform; assignment submissions; peer evaluations of assignments; and video-watching.

We find that belonging to a larger team with teammates active in the course predicts course completion. Similarly, being on a team that interacts more with each other also predicts more positive course outcomes. We present these findings, as well as descriptions of other relationships within the data.

The evidence suggests there can be large potential gains from well-implemented teams. Although in courses of short duration it may be inappropriate to speak of functioning communities of learners, teammates can and do guide each other through difficulties (solving technical problems, clarifying assignments, and reminding each other of requirements), deepen cognitive understanding of concepts, and hone each other’s professional practice.

Yet the evidence also suggests that learners differ in their preferences for working with teammates, and intrusive or artificial emphasis on teams may hinder some learners. This leaves the open question: what kinds of teams can be designed into courses that will improve results for these learners?

Authors

• Betsy Anne Williams, Stanford University

• Hsiaolin Hsieh, Stanford University