Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently experienced rapid development and garnered significant attention from various populations. Despite the wide recognition of MOOCs as an important opportunity within educational practices, there are still many questions as to how we might satisfy students' needs, as evidenced by very high dropout rates. Researchers lack a solid understanding of what student needs are being addressed by MOOCs, and how well MOOCs now address (or fail to address) these needs. To help in building such an understanding, we conducted in-depth interviews probing student motivations, learning perceptions and experiences towards MOOCs, paying special attention to the MOOC affordances and experiences that might lead to high drop rates. Our study identified learning motivations, learning patterns, and a number of factors that appear to influence student retention. We proposed that the issue of retention should be addressed from two perspectives: retention as a problem but also retention as an opportunity.

Understanding Student Motivation, Behaviors and Perceptions in MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced rapid expansion and gained significant popularity among students and educators. Although the broad acceptance of MOOCs, there is still a long way to go in terms of satisfaction of students’ needs, as witnessed in the extremely high drop-out rates. Working toward improving MOOCs, we employ the Grounded Theory Method (GTM) in a quantitative study and explore this new phenomenon. In particular, we present a novel analysis using a real-world data set with user-generated online reviews, where we both identify the student, course, platform, and university characteristics that affect student retention and estimate their relative effect. In the conducted analysis, we integrate econometric, text mining, opinion mining, and machine learning techniques, building both explanatory and predictive models, toward a more complete analysis. This study also provides actionable insights for MOOCs and education, in general, and contributes to the related literature discovering new findings.

https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~padamopo/What%20makes%20a%20great%20MOOC.pdf

What Makes a Great MOOC? An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Student Retention in Online Courses

Current scholarship has explored how the carceral state governs and regulates populations. This literature has focused on prison and on the wide-reaching collateral consequences of a felony conviction. Despite the obvious importance of these findings, they capture only a portion of the criminal justice system’s operations. In most jurisdictions, misdemeanors, not felonies, constitute the bulk of criminal cases, and the number of such arrests is rising. This article explores a puzzling fact about New York City’s pioneering experiment in mass misdemeanor arrests: the preponderance result in no finding of guilt and no assignment of formal punishment. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, this article explores how the criminal justice system functions to regulate significant populations without conviction or sentencing. The author details the operation of penal power through the techniques of marking through criminal justice record keeping, the procedural hassle of case processing, and mandated performance evalu...

Misdemeanor Justice: Control without Conviction1

Preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Lash-Ups: Goods and Bads 2. Inside Stuff: How Professionals Do It 3. Form and Function 4. Changing Goods 5. Venues and Middlemen 6. Place in Product 7. Corporate Organization and the Design Big Thing 8. Moral Rules: New for Old

Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (Spanish edition)

A common theme in social science studies of algorithms is that they are profoundly opaque and function as “black boxes.” Scholars have developed several methodological approaches in order to address algorithmic opacity. Here I argue that we can explicitly enroll algorithms in ethnographic research, which can shed light on unexpected aspects of algorithmic systems—including their opacity. I delineate three meso-level strategies for algorithmic ethnography. The first, algorithmic refraction, examines the reconfigurations that take place when computational software, people, and institutions interact. The second strategy, algorithmic comparison, relies on a similarity-and-difference approach to identify the instruments’ unique features. The third strategy, algorithmic triangulation, enrolls algorithms to help gather rich qualitative data. I conclude by discussing the implications of this toolkit for the study of algorithms and future of ethnographic fieldwork.

The ethnographer and the algorithm: beyond the black box

As has been apparent for the past several months, MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courseware) have emerged as a powerful contender for the next new education technology. Yet the landscape of education technology is littered with the remains of previous technological breakthroughs that have failed to live up to their initial promise, or at least their initial rhetoric. This panel will present a lively debate about the promise, and realities, of MOOCs and whether they are transformative, or merely a faddish trend.

/pdf/will-massive-online-open-courses-moocs-change-education-3qgmtsjitq.pdf

Will massive online open courses (moocs) change education

Were a future historian to turn to the sociological literature of the past fifty years to seek information on how members of different races were living together in urban areas, he or she would get almost no sense of the extent to which blacks and whites (not to mention other groups) have interacted along and across racial lines. Harvey Molotch’s Managed Integration (1972) showed, by counting the number of blacks and whites in various stores and commercial spaces, that they may have gone shopping side by side, but otherwise, they did not socialize in public. There has been little ethnographic data collected on the topic since. In works like Massey and Denton’s American Apartheid (1994) and Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), which emphasize the extent of social isolation and segregation in the United States, interaction suffuses these studies as an imputed variable. These works were never intended to be informative about the actual interactions that occur between and outside such communities as their inhabitants circulate throughout the city, but the influence of demographic images could give the impression that blacks and whites barely interact.

Elijah Anderson on Race Relations and Public Space: Beyond the Primacy of the Street

This paper describes a simple strategy for doing more reliable ethnography: after fieldwork has commenced, investigators can use thought experiments to recognize inconvenient phenomena. Two examples are discussed: “the ethnographic trial” and the “inconvenience sample.” The paper uses Clifford Geertz's classic “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” as a case of how work could be made more reliable with such strategies. It highlights the value of systematically identifying aspects of the situation under study that have been excluded from the analysis.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/41336916.pdf

How not to lie with ethnography

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Will massive online open courses (moocs) change education

Elijah Anderson on Race Relations and Public Space: Beyond the Primacy of the Street

How not to lie with ethnography