Exploring communities of inquiry in Massive Open Online Courses
Graphical abstract
Introduction
The growing interest in MOOCs and online education more broadly has been fueled by various social, economic, and political factors that have converged to emphasize the growing societal need for an accessible and sustainable higher education. Some of the factors include concerns surrounding student debt (Matthews, 2013), increasing requirements for lifelong learning to sustain future employment opportunities (Fini, 2009), and an overall need to provide more accessible and democratized models of higher education (Siemens, 2013). While MOOCs have brought online learning to the center of public interest (Gašević et al., 2014, Kovanović et al., 2015b), their development has not been without its challenges.
A particularly significant challenge associated with the MOOC development relates to the present state of MOOC pedagogical designs and the disconnect with the current state of research in online and distance education. MOOCs were originally developed by researchers in online education as an experimentation platform for novel online pedagogical approaches based on the connectivist learning theory (Siemens, 2005), that emphasized the distributed course organization and self-directed student learning. As indicated by Rodriguez (2012), this form of MOOCs is now commonly known as connectivist MOOCs or cMOOCs. A prevalent group of current MOOCs, also known as xMOOCs (Rodriguez, 2012), have tended to adopt a learning design structured around the pre-recorded video lectures, automated assignments, and quizzes with limited direct teaching interaction undertaken by the instructor. This model of design and teaching is selected for its capacity to scale content and learning activities to a large number of students while diminishing the constraints associated with the need for instructors to engage with individual learners (Ng & Widom, 2014).
The present models of MOOC pedagogical design are essentially focused on the transmission of content. This approach represents a radical departure from contemporary distance education practice that is grounded in social constructivist models of learning (Anderson & Dron, 2010). These models assume that students – rather than assimilating predefined knowledge – actively construct their knowledge through a series of interactions with learning content, instructors, and other students. This knowledge construction process is dependent also on their existing knowledge and experiences, meta-cognitive processes, and a particular learning context. By following the behaviorist notion of learning, the dominating MOOC design arguably represents a step back in the quality and richness of online instruction (Bali, 2014, Stacey, 2013). A plausible rationale for this disconnect lies in the multidisciplinary nature of MOOC and online learning research and the strong fragmentation of the MOOC research community to researchers from the field of education and researchers from the field of computer science (Gašević et al., 2014). With researchers from computer science and engineering fields often following a theory-agnostic philosophy of data analysis (Chris, Chris, & Science, 2008), the departure from the contemporary learning theories is not surprising. The disconnect with the previous line of research in online and distance education may also explain the enthusiasm of the early xMOOCs proponents. Although being dubbed a “revolution” (Friedman, 2012) and “tsunami” (Hennessy, 2012) in the field of education, they represent a logical “evolutionary” step in the development of online and distance learning (Bali, 2014, Daniel, 2014).
This paper presents the results of a study examining the use of the contemporary social constructivist models of online and distance education within the MOOC context. The focus of the analysis is on the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison et al., 1999), a well-known and one of the most widely-adopted models of distance education (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007). The CoI model outlines critical dimensions which shape students’ online learning experience and also provides a survey instrument used for their assessment (Arbaugh et al., 2008). This paper examines if the CoI survey instrument can be used to evaluate the interactions in MOOC courses. Given the many pedagogical differences between MOOCs and “traditional,” small-scale online-courses, a re-validation of the existing CoI survey instrument and its factor structure was conducted using the data of 1487 students from five MOOC courses. By examining the CoI model of online learning within the MOOC context, we aim to bridge the gap between research in online learning and current MOOC pedagogical practices and to enable its use for assessment of the quality of MOOC learning experience. The results of our analyses and the broader theoretical and practical implications are further discussed.
Section snippets
Overview of the community of inquiry model
The Community of Inquiry (CoI) (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 1999) framework is a widely adopted pedagogical model that outlines the critical dimensions that shape a students’ online learning experience. Rooted in the constructivist notions of learning Dewey (1933) and the work of Lipman (1991), the CoI model (Fig. 1) focuses on the development of higher-order thinking through inquiry-based learning in a learning community. In this context, learning community is defined as “a group of
Research questions
While there has been substantial work on the validation of the CoI instrument, the primary context was traditional, formal education, with data coming from the small-scale, for-credit online courses. However, to our knowledge, the use of CoI model and validation of its survey instrument have not been examined within the MOOC context. Given the rapidly emerging MOOC research, as well the broad adoption of the CoI model within traditional online settings, the goal of the present study is to
Study data
The data for this study was collected from five different MOOCs offered by the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands on edX platform during the Fall 2014 term (Table 1). The courses included a range of learning activities such as recorded video materials, reading materials, short multiple-choice quizzes, homework assignments, and online forum discussions (see Hennis, Topolovec, Poquet, & de Vries, 2016). Students who successfully completed a course were issued a course completion
RQ1: reliability analysis results
To validate the CoI survey instrument in the MOOC context, we examined the reliability of the CoI instrument using Cronbach's alpha measure (Cronbach, 1951). All three subscales obtained overall reliability scores of 0.89 or above (Table 2) which indicates a reliable measurement instrument (Kline, 1999). We can also see that none of the items on all three subscales had an alpha value higher than the overall alpha value, indicating that none of the items negatively affects instrument
RQ1: reliability of the CoI instrument in the MOOC context
The results from the reliability analysis confirmed that the use of the CoI survey instrument within the MOOC context is internally consistent. The obtained Cronbach's α values for the three subscales were just slightly lower than the ones in the existing research (Swan et al., 2008) and still sufficiently above the 0.8 level which is often used in the literature (Kline, 1999). Similar to the previous studies (Díaz et al., 2010, Garrison et al., 2010b, Shea and Bidjerano, 2009, Swan et al., 2008
Conclusions
In this paper, we evaluated the use of the CoI survey instrument within the MOOC context. Through the exploratory factor analysis of the data () from five MOOCs, we examined whether the differences between traditional small-scale online courses, for which the CoI survey was initially designed, and MOOCs affect the reliability and validity of the CoI survey instrument. First of all, our results indicate that Community of Inquiry survey instrument is a reliable and valid tool for measuring
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