Why do over 90% of the learners in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) never finish the course? There is a need for further studies focusing on the learners' experiences of participating in MOOCs and factors that influence the decision to complete or drop out of the course. To deepen our understanding of why learners complete or drop out of MOOCs,…

Increasing attention is paid to organisational learning, with the success of contemporary organisations strongly contingent on their ability to learn and grow. Importantly, informal learning is argued to be even more significant than formal learning initiatives. Given the widespread use of digital technologies in the workplace, what requires…

This paper is largely based on the experience of teaching law to students with non-legal background in business schools, with a focus on internationalisation and the large class lecture format. Business schools often consist of large classes which include a significant proportion of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) students. Teaching a…

The paper describes empirical investigations of how participants in a MOOC learn, and the implications for MOOC design. A learner capability to generate higher order learning in MOOCs--called crowd-sourced learning (C-SL) capability--was defined from learning science literature. The capability comprised a complex yet interrelated array of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how, and the extent to which, massive open online courses (MOOCs) might be used in the accreditation of students' prior learning, in programme delivery at international branch campuses, and for lecturers' professional development (PD) in transnational higher education.…

There is a revolution taking place in teacher/learner/technology relations. At primary, secondary and tertiary education levels, teachers and students are being confronted by new technologies, new pedagogies, new relationships in teacher-student roles, as well as reconsiderations about how information is to be learned. The growth of information…

A deluge of empirical research became available on MOOCs in 2013-2015 and this research is available in disparate sources. This paper addresses a number of gaps in the scholarly understanding of MOOCs and presents a comprehensive picture of the literature by examining the geographic distribution, publication outlets, citations, data collection and…

Large first-year biology classes, with their heavy emphasis on factual content, contribute to low student engagement and misrepresent the dynamic, interdisciplinary nature of biological science. We sought to redesign a course to deliver fundamental biology curriculum through the study of health, promote skills development, and encourage a deeper…

This study measures the effects of increased faculty-student engagement on student learning, success rates, and perceptions in a Physical Oceanography course. The study separately implemented two teaching methods that had been shown to be successful in a different discipline, introductory physics. These methods were the use of interactive…

The authors present findings from the first stage of research into a "home-grown" connectivist MOOC, Rhizomatic Learning: The Community is the Curriculum (Rhizo14). We compare the surface view of the MOOC that has been presented in a range of open blog posts and articles with the view from beneath the surface that we have found in data…

There are many positive aspects of teaching and learning in Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), for both instructors and students. However, there is also a considerable amount of negativity in MOOCs, emerging from learners on discussion forums and through peer assessment, from disciplinary colleagues and from public discourse around MOOCs.…

In understanding the changes that are impacting the global higher education sector, developing a critique of the relationships between technology and technological innovation, new managerialism and financialisation, and the impact of the secular crisis of global capitalism is critical. Moreover, it is important to critique these changes…

With large student enrollment, MOOC instructors face the unique challenge in deciding when to intervene in forum discussions with their limited bandwidth. We study this problem of "instructor intervention." Using a large sample of forum data culled from 61 courses, we design a binary classifier to predict whether an instructor should…

Current schemes to categorise MOOC students result from a single view on the population which either contains the engagement of the students or demographics or self reported motivation. We propose a new hierarchical student categorisation, which uses common online activities capturing both engagement and achievement of MOOC students. A first level…

Since it was first introduced in 2008, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been attracting a lot of interest. Since then, MOOCs have emerged as powerful platforms for teaching and learning academic writing. However, there has been no detailed investigation of academic writing MOOCs. As a result, much uncertainty still exists about the…